



Glass J3 f\ ^^ 



Book 



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THE GLASS OF FASHION 



By the Same JIuthor 



The Mirrors of Downing Street 




Graphic Photo Union 



MARGOT ASQUITH 



THE GLASS OF 
FASHION 

SOME SOCIAL REFLECTIONS 

BY 
A GENTLEMAN WITH A DUSTER 

AUTHOR OF "THE MIRRORS OF DOWNING STREET" 



The cymbals crash, 

And the dancers walk; 
With long silk stockings, 

And arms of chalk, 
Butterfly skirts, 

And white breasts bare; 
And shadows of dead men 

Watching 'em there. 

— Alfred Noyes. 



" You ask me if I am going to ' The Masquerade ' ? 
I am at it: Circumspice." — Cornelius O'Dowd. 



ILLUSTRATED 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

Ubc Iftnicfeerbocfter press 

1921 



TJ/\^ 






Copyright, 192 1 

by 
G. P. Putnam's Sons 

Printed in the United States of America 







J 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

*- In a letter to Mary Gladstone, the painter Burne- 
Jones, who was also an idealist, broke into lamentation 
over the quarrels and trivial animosities which too often 
exist between men of genius. 

My dear [he exclaimed], if twelve of these men 
would hold together for one ten years the whole as- 
pect of the world would be changed — and twelve 
men did once hold together and the whole face of the 
world was changed. 

What might not happen to this world, let us ask our- 
selves, if the two great Commonwealths, which have 
inherited, with the language of Shakespeare and Wyclif , 
the moral idealism of Milton and Lincoln, held together 
for a generation — not for any political end, however 
worthy, nor to impose their military power upon man- 
kind, even in the cause of universal disarmament, but 
merely to define, make manifest, and exalt the moral 
values of human life ? 

Because I believe such a unity is possible, nay, is in 
the nature of things, I, heartily wishful for the moral 
comradeship of America and earnestly seeking the 



vi PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

intellectual alliance of America, venture in true friend- 
liness and with all due respect to address this personal 
word to the American reader of my book, The Glass of 
Fashion. 

I would say to him : Since the questions with which 
this pamphlet deals are questions of importance to your 
country as well as to mine, do not, I pray you, let its 
English setting stand in the way of your American 
attention. For the same contagion of materialism which 
is attempting to destroy us is also attempting to destroy 
you, and the same depression of a false science which is 
weighing down the human spirit in these British Islands 
is also weighing down the human spirit in your United 
States of America. 

You, too, have your Repingtons and Margots; and 
you, too, have the same heroic but ineffectual goodness 
which here in England vainly seeks to stem the mon- 
strous flood of modern animalism. We are both of us 
cursed by the same inheritance from the last century, 
the inheritance of a scientific falsehood — that "night- 
mare of waste and death," as Samuel Butler called it, 
which is "as baseless as it is repulsive." We are both 
held by the same philosophical paralysis which has 
crept over the human mind ever since the dark and dis- 
figuring shadow of Darwinism fell upon the fields of life. 
In both of us the cancer of cynicism (that arrest of the 
moral tissues, that check in spiritual development) 
preys upon the divine faculties of our humanity whereby 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION vii 

alone we can respond to the joy, wonder, and beauty of 
existence. With you, as with us, life has lost its way, 
and neither for you nor for us can there be hope of com- 
ing into our true inheritance until we have recovered 
those title-deeds to immortality which our fathers 
threw away when they set out to wander in the wilder- 
ness of this false materialism. 

If, then, there is hope of a Renaissance in England, 
there must also be hope of a Renaissance in America. 
And the same spirit which can give this new birth to 
England can also give a new birth to America. There- 
fore let us take counsel together, and if we come to a 
like decision in this great matter, let us set out as one 
spirit to change the face of the world. 

Now this is my conviction : Out of the stagnant fen 
of materialism into which humanity seems at this time 
to be fast sinking, with all the glories of its mechanical 
achievements and all the splendours of its earliest poetic 
enthusiasms, like a sun that has had its day, we can be 
lifted only by one of those great waves of moral en- 
lightenment which in the first century of our dispensa- 
tion saved mankind from the darkness of paganism and 
in the sixteenth century rescued Europe from the 
clutches of an iron dogmatism. 

If we would live we must overthrow the false science 
which is destroying us, as the fathers of Christianity 
overthrew paganism, and the fathers of the Renaissance 
overthrew authority. In both of those great epochs of 



viii PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

the past, humanity escaped from the prison-house of a 
tyranny into the open country of freedom. Life, feeling 
itself at the point of death, flung itself far forward into 
an untrodden future. With us it must be the same. We 
cannot niggle with the oppression which is destroying 
us; we must throw it off, throw it far from us, and go 
forward to a new dawn in human history. 

To this end I suggest that we should look at Fashion, 
which shows us the set of the human tide more strikingly 
than any other manifestation of contemporary thought. 
I suggest that we should take Fashion seriously. I 
suggest that we should take the measure of the leaders 
of mankind, those who set the fashion of daily life, 
whose influence is the moral climate in which we breathe 
and form our opinions. I argue that if their measure 
does not square with the highest hopes of the human 
race, and does not square with the deepest needs of the 
human spirit, then we must put those leaders away from 
us, and find others more worthy of man's place in the 
universe. This can be done only by right-thinking, 
but right-thinking which is militant. 

With you, as with us, the fashion of daily life is set 
by those who have sacrificed to a false science, almost 
without thought, the one great secret of joy, namely, 
faith in a creative purpose, faith in man's immortality. 
It is that secret we must recover for mankind, and we 
can recover it only by making remorseless war on this 
false science. It is useless to make war on luxury, or to 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION ix 

make war on folly, or to make war on the odious ugli- 
ness of materialism. We must make war on the thought 
which brings such spiritual malformations into exist- 
ence. Right thinking, armed with the sword of truth, 
must destroy wrong-thinking drunk with the dope of 
Circean lies. 

Our first reason for making war on that false thought 
is this : it is destroying us ; our second reason, that it is 
not true. 

Darwinism not only justifies the sensualist at the 
trough and Fashion at her glass ; it justifies Prussianism 
at the cannon, and Bolshevism at the prison-door. If 
Darwinism be true, if Mind is to be driven out of the 
universe and accident accepted as a sufficient cause for 
all the majesty and glory of physical nature, then there 
is no crime of violence, however abominable in its cir- 
cumstances and, however cruel in its execution which 
cannot be justified by success, and no triviality, no 
absurdity of Fashion, which deserves a censure: more — 
there is no act of disinterested love and tenderness, no 
deed of self-sacrifice and mercy, no aspiration after 
beauty and excellence, for which a single reason can be 
adduced in logic. 

On these grounds alone Darwinism is condemned; 
but it is condemned also on scientific grounds. Dar- 
winism explains only the least interesting changes and 
modifications in physical structure: it does not explain 
the movement of life or its manifest direction towards 



x PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

excellence ; and as to origins, and as to the final destina- 
tion of all this vast and orderly movement of life, it is 
dumb. Nevertheless this false science, this utterly 
inadequate theory, which was challenged at the outset, 
doubted by great men throughout its victorious course 
of dominion, and which is now acknowledged by every 
thinker to be but a partial explanation of a few not very 
important phenomena, still rules the mind of the multi- 
tude. The mob believes in Darwinian evolution, be- 
lieves that the universe is an accident, life is an accident, 
and beauty is an accident. It has made up its mind on 
hearsay, and incorporated into its moods, without real- 
isation of the logical consequences, a theory of existence 
which is as false as it is destructive. And this mob, com- 
posed of all classes, carries the destinies of the human 
race. It is not with the philosopher and man of science 
we have got to reckon, but with a doped, embittered, 
and now incurious mass — the laggard and joyless bulk 
of mankind which is blundering because it walks in its 
sleep. 

We are in the hands of cynicism. All those high and 
beautiful things which the noblest sons of men have 
cherished in all generations now stand at the peril of 
brutality ; and no statesmanship can save them. The one 
insurance against calamity is a new "climate of opin- 
ion," universal as the air we breathe. The mob must 
be awakened. The windows of the house of life must 
be flung wide open. The mind of humanity must live. 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xi 

It is for those of us who hold that without faith in the 
immortality of man there can be no right thinking to 
assert that great faith with a crusading valour, to 
assert it and re-assert it, until humanity recovers its 
spiritual dignity and the long labours of evolution find 
at last their final impulse in the conscious co-operation 
of mankind. 



INTRODUCTION 

With no disrespect to the House of Lords, I consider there 
is no position higher than that of an English country gentle- 
man. — Pemberton Milnes. 

The grave moralist concerns himself with evils so 
flagrant that no one is in any doubt as to their nature. 
He is the policeman of society, keeping his eye on the 
burglar, the publican, and the prostitute. The satirist 
and the comic artist, on the other hand, are concerned 
with such matters as fashion and manners, matters 
which seem beneath the notice of the grave moralist, 
but which nevertheless exercise a more potent influence 
on society than the teaching of philosophers, the pro- 
grammes of political reformers, and the machinations 
of the criminal classes. 

Folly, not vice, is the enemy. Our curse is not origi- 
nal sin but aboriginal stupidity. It is human to err, 
inhuman to practise iniquity. We blunder rather than 
sin. Few men set out to reach hell, but most of us are 
for ever losing our way to heaven. 

Folly, as an aberration, is laughable; as a fashion, as a 
rule of life, it is disastrous. 

The object of this book is to convince people of two 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

truths hitherto obscured by tolerance and careless 
thinking — the danger of Folly: the value to a liberal 
State of a valid Aristocracy. I would persuade men 
that Folly, which has never cared a snap of its fingers for 
the satirist, is a pervasive poison which corrupts the 
entire body of a people, and that a democratic State, 
if it would make a powerful contribution to the 
higher life of the human race, needs at • its head a 
small body of enlightened people conscious of its duty 
to the Commonwealth and religiously determined 
to set the highest possible standard in manners and 
morals. 

To those who say that satire is the proper weapon to 
be directed against Folly, and declare the suggestion 
absurd that the artillery of moral indignation should be 
levied against such trivial things as the excesses of Fash- 
ion, I would make this simple answer: Satire is the 
instrument of the cynic, not of the critic, the tool of the 
destroyer, not of the builder, and its victories in history 
have been chiefly defeats of virtue, not destructions of 
vice. Folly survives. And it survives in the cool as- 
surance that the satires which have been directed 
against it are so many bouquets laid at its triumphant 
feet. 

The reason of this, I think, is plain enough. The 
satirist is a spectator. He makes amusing or stinging 
remarks on the spectacle of human activity, rather to 
obtain the applause of brother cynics than to assist 



INTRODUCTION xv 

humanity in its work. He is, in some particulars, a 
great danger to the State, for he tends to make a com- 
munity believe that what so frivolous or ironic a spirit 
considers laughable cannot conceivably be worth the 
attention of serious people. 

The critic, on the other hand, is a worker. He seeks 
to help the labour of humanity by sound advice and 
true guidance. His utterances are not meant to amuse, 
to wound, or to destroy, but to help. He desires excel- 
lence. 

I would make this point quite clear at the outset, 
because, having published some of the notes of this 
book in a weekly paper, I realise from letters which 
have reached me how very difficult it is for certain 
individuals to get an unaccustomed notion into their 
heads. It seems to be a rooted idea with numbers of 
the public that criticism of Aristocracy is a part of the 
propaganda of revolution. They cannot distinguish 
between criticism and abuse ; they hold that the remedy 
for an evil is to hush it up — as if one could hush up a 
gramophone at an open window. This being the condi- 
tion of a number of minds, the reader will bear with me, 
I hope, while I endeavour in a few words to make my 
purpose perfectly plain. 

I am setting out neither to laugh at Fashion, after the 
manner of the satirists, nor to abuse it, after the manner 
of political extremists, but to criticise it in the spirit of 
one who clearly recognises its value to the Common- 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

wealth and would have it faithful to its duties and proud 
of its privileges. 

My standpoint explains everything. It is that of 
the central classes. I regard the summit of Nobility 
from the middle-distance of the Gentry. It is in the 
interests of the entire Commonwealth, but from the 
position of the central classes, that I criticise the set of 
people who now occupy the summit of our national life 
and by their manners and morals create that "climate 
of opinion" in which we all live. I would persuade these 
people that they have great duties and great responsi- 
bilities ; and further I would convince the Gentry that it 
is their eminent business to see that these people per- 
form those duties and discharge those responsibilities. 

By the term Fashion I mean all those noisy, ostenta- 
tious, and frivolous people, patricians and plutocrats, 
politicians and financiers, lawyers and tradesmen, ac- 
tors and artists, who have scrambled on to the summit 
of England's national life, and who, setting the worst 
possible examples in morals and manners, are never so 
happy as when they are making people talk about them. 
It is of these ostentatious people I write, and my chief 
hope is to make the Gentry of England talk about them 
in such a manner as will either bring them to a sense of 
their duties or lead to their expulsion from the heights. 

Let me persuade timorous people that the social 
order has much more to fear from the silence of the 
Gentry in this matter than from the vituperative abuse 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

of the demagogue. The peril of our day is the implica- 
tion of the Gentry of England in the notorious vulgarity 
of "all that is fast, furious, and fashionable"; there lies 
a main opportunity of the social wrecker. 



CONTENTS 



Preface to the American Edition 
Introduction .... 
I. — Principles of the Commonwealth 
II. — Colonel Repington's Diaries 
III. — Some Glimpses of the Normal 
IV. — Mrs. Asquith's Autobiography 
V. — A Study in Contrast 
VI. — III Effects .... 
VII.— The Other Side . . . 
VIII. — Manners .... 

IX. — Examples in Love . 
X. — Womanhood .... 
XI. — Conclusion .... 





PAGE 




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17 




27 




37 


• 


57 


• 


73 


• 


82 


• 


113 


• 


137 


• 


153 


• 


167 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Margot Asquith 

Lady Harrowby 

Lord Morley .... 

General Sir Ian Hamilton 

Rt. Hon. Arthur James Balfour 

The Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone 

Mrs. Gladstone at Hawarden 

Colonel Charles Repington 



Frontispiece 



16 
32 
48 
64 
80 
112 
I44 



ANONYMITY 

We should be able to use from our hearts 
the words which one of Mr. Carlyle's blood- 
thirsty heroes spoke with his lips, "Let 
our names perish, but the cause prevail " ; 
or if we cannot, the sooner we are driven to 
this, and are taught to feel that our names 
are worth nothing except as they help 
forward the cause, the better it will be for 
us. F. D. Maurice. 

What is your opinion of the play ? 

Well, who's it by ? 

That is a secret for the present. 

You don't expect me to know what to 
say about a play when I don't know who 
the author is, do you ? 

Fanny's First Play. 



THE GLASS OF FASHION 



THE GLASS OF FASHION 

CHAPTER I 
PRINCIPLES OF THE COMMONWEALTH 

Friend, call me what you will; no jot care I: 
I that shall stand for England till I die. 
England! The England that rejoiced to see 
Hellas unbound, Italy one and free; 
The England that had tears for Poland's doom, 
And in her heart for all the world made room; 
The England from whose side I have not swerved, 
The Immortal England whom I, too, have served, 
Accounting her all living lands above 
In Justice, and in Mercy, and in Love. 

William Watson. 

. . . No people can be called fully civilised until there 
is widely diffused among its members the sense of their obli- 
gation, not merely to obey the law, but to obey it willingly, 
and to co-operate in enforcing and maintaining it. — Ramsay 
Muir. 

What is the meaning of England ? What is the political 
value of that name in the world, its significance in the 
eyes of other nations? Is it possible for us to express 
in simple language what we feel to be the historical 

3 



4 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

definition of that name, that great name of England, as 
Henry James has it? 

In the spring of 1918, Mr. Alfred Zimmern published 
an article in The Round Table which set before man- 
kind, with a lucidity, a temperance, and a reverence for 
truth which did not always characterise our war prop- 
aganda, the three doctrines which were at that moment 
in perilous conflict. 

The guns (he said) are still speaking as in 1914, and 
they will go on speaking, ever more forcibly, till victory is 
achieved; since, in the great argument which Prussia 
provoked, no other decision avails. 

But side by side with the guns, and mixing its music 
with theirs, goes a running undercurrent of discussion, of 
questioning, of philosophising. Men who never reasoned 
before are turning their minds to consider the cause for 
which their continued endurance is demanded. 

Do not let us forget that endurance ; it should under- 
line the definition at which we are attempting to arrive. 
For the sake of England, let us never cease to remind 
ourselves, men endured greater horrors than ever before 
in the history of mankind visited and afflicted the 
human soul. We might almost say, indeed, that from 
the days of the Homeric contests down to those bur- 
lesque battles of armoured and mounted men in the mid- 
dle ages, and on to the almost bloodless manoeuvres of 
1871, war had never existed until 1914. With a higher 
sensibility than was known to ancient warriors, with a 



PRINCIPLES OF THE COMMONWEALTH 5 

far more delicate nervous organism, and with the 
greater tenderness of heart which we hope is one of the 
fruits of British civilisation, young Englishmen were 
called upon to take part in such a mangling of butchery, 
such an indiscriminate anarchy of slaughter and 
mutilation, such a filthiness of Bedlamite carnage, as no 
man had witnessed from the beginning of time. 

And this ordeal was endured in circumstances of 
the greatest disgust. Separated from their families, 
torn from their homes, and thrown into the constant 
and intimate companionship of entire strangers in a 
foreign land, these English boys lived a life so foreign 
and unnatural to civilised man that even the shattering 
sound of the shells came to be reckoned a less evil than 
the mud of their burrowings, and the loathsome afflic- 
tion of the lice that preyed upon their bodies. 

In such circumstances of horror and disgust the 
clean youth of England endured the most searching 
and terrible ordeal to which the human mind has ever 
been subjected in the whole history of the world, not for 
a week, not for a month, but for years. 

What was it that held them to their posts? "Men 
who never reasoned before are turning their minds to 
consider the cause for which their continued endurance 
is demanded." We may be sure that not many young 
Englishmen were deluded by the politician's promise of 
a new England fit for heroes to live in. War had dis- 
posed them to be cynical. They had no illusions. 



6 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

Their reasons were occupied with far other thoughts 
than those which lend themselves so easily to political 
rhetoric. How had this horrible thing come to pass? 
What had the older people been doing to allow such a 
calamity to occur? Was there any escape from this 
beastliness ? 

The answer to that last question was universal in the 
armies of the liberal nations : No escape till Prussianism 
is destroyed. 

This feeling was instinctive, rather than rational, 
but out of it, as the call for endurance continued into 
the terrible spring of 191 8, grew a discussion which 
enabled the thoughtful English soldier to realise that he 
was, in sober truth and in the plainest prose, a spiritual 
warrior. 

Men discussed however crudely the three doctrines 
which Mr. Alfred Zimmern set out so admirably in 
the pages of The Round Table — the doctrine of 
Prussianism, the doctrine of Bolshevism, and the 
doctrine of the Commonwealth. They examined 
these doctrines and came to a rough conclusion 
about them. Prussianism meant political slavery; 
Bolshevism meant economic slavery; England, with 
all its faults, meant personal freedom. It was worth 
holding out. 

With this endurance of our soldiers never absent 
from our thoughts, let us*examine these Three Doctrines 
as they are now presented to us by Mr. Alfred Zimmern 



PRINCIPLES OF THE COMMONWEALTH 7 

in the collection of his essays entitled Nationality and 
Government. * 

Prussianism, he reminds us, is no new thing. "You 
know as well as we do," said the Athenians in 416 B.C. 
to the representatives of a small people of their day, 
"that right, as the world goes, is only in question 
between equals in power, while the strong do what they 
can, and the weak suffer what they must." Frederick 
the Great, in the war of the Pragmatic Sanction, was 
no innovator; how much less was Bethmann-Hollweg 
original when he made light of treaties and declared 
that necessity had no law. 

Prussianism is a science of government which refuses 
any relation with ethics. Even as a clever Irishman 
in the eighties declared that art has no connection with 
morals, arguing a fallacious thesis so brilliantly that he 
deceived even many just people, so the philosophers, 
historians, statesmen, yes, and even in our day the very 
moralists of Germany, argue that government has no 
concern with morals. 

They remind us of the simple person who inquired 
concerning the Siamese twins whether they were 
brothers. 

Manifestly, if man is a moral being, he must be 
moral in all his actions. He cannot be a moral indi- 
vidual, and an immoral official, or an immoral artist, 
or an immoral tradesman. Morality, that is to say, 

1 Nationality and Government, by Alfred Zimmern. 



8 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

must be of the very stuff and texture of his being, not a 
decoration for special occasions, or a black coat for 
Sunday; it must be the soul of the man himself. The 
German statesman, we may be sure, would complain if 
his butcher cheated him, and would not listen to the 
butcher's argument that butchery has nothing to do 
with ethics. So too, one imagines, the immoral artist 
would not be satisfied by the excuse of the solicitor who 
had embezzled his money that the legal profession has 
no connection with ethics. 

But this is to argue with absurdity. 

Prussianism, nevertheless, in spite of its manifest 
absurdity, has a philosophical foundation. It holds that 
human nature is not to be trusted, that man is born a 
slave to impulses and caprices which would assuredly 
ruin him but for the interference and discipline of an 
iron authority. It sets up that Authority — a ma- 
chine which takes feeble and defenceless humanity 
into its cogs — and hammers that dangerous raw 
material into the disciplined man-power of a mighty 
State. 

The Prussian soldier endured all the horrors endured 
by the British soldier, and truly fought with a courage 
which could not be excelled; but his discipline and 
courage were manufactured for him by a System which 
uses the slave-owner's instrument of frightfulness and 
directs itself to human fear. 

Prussianism, then, is Authority. But of what nature 



PRINCIPLES OF THE COMMONWEALTH 9 

is that Authority? It is the Authority of a Material- 
ism which denies morality, the Authority of National- 
ism, Self -Assertion, Conquest, and Brutality. To the 
Prussian the individual has neither dignity nor rights 
outside his State. The State is everything; the in- 
dividual is its slave. But the individual, in order to 
serve the State, must not be neglected — he must be 
cultivated and equipped for the discharge of his duties. 
Hence Prussianism has taken the great and sacred 
weapon of knowledge, and made it serve an evil purpose. 
The people of Germany are educated and trained as 
no other people in the world. Mentally they have 
no superiors. But in character they are inferior to the 
least of the nations, and the worst of them are on a level 
with savages. It is not Authority that is responsible 
for this mass destruction, but the nature of the Au- 
thority. Prussianism is Machinery. It is brain, not 
character. It is the State, not Man. 

Bolshevism, as Mr. Zimmern says, is akin to 
Prussianism. It is a religion founded in violence, 
and inspired by contempt of individual freedom. It 
distrusts the human race; it hates the human soul. 
By terror and by ruthless force, humanity is to be 
shackled to the tumbril of an economic theory. It 
is not a new thing; it is as old as slavery. Mr. Ber- 
trand Russell, in the ablest book yet published on the 
Russian Revolution, and the most persuasive because 
the most honest, outspoken, and courageous, shows to 



io THE GLASS OF FASHION 

all those who have eyes to see that beneath the verbiage 
of Lenin and beneath the communistic mask of Trotsky- 
there is in truth nothing more original than the hideous 
features of despotism and tyranny. 

The Englishman sees with clearness that neither the 
doctrine of Prussianism nor the doctrine of Bolshevism 
squares with his inherent notions of the purposes of 
existence. He has freedom in his blood, and a long 
tradition of common sense in his mind. England by no 
means fulfils at present his ideal of a commonwealth, 
but it is on the right road, a road at any rate which 
leads onward, not a side turning which ends in a cul-de- 
sac. He prefers to march onward as a free man rather 
than to find himself trapped by a tyranny. Prussianism 
is not yet destroyed. It has its votaries in this country, 
just as Bolshevism has ; and for the next few years the 
conflict between these two doctrines and the doctrine of 
the Commonwealth will be fought out in discussions of 
various kinds on English soil. It is a good thing that 
this should be so, for truth has no fear of an open conflict 
with error. 

Let us see how the doctrine of the Commonwealth, 
the English principle, compares with these two doctrines 
which are so similar in spirit and both of which are so 
fatal to the higher life of the human race. 

Mr. Zimmern, comparing our methods of education 
with the German, quotes the opening words of the 
English Code: 



PRINCIPLES OF THE COMMONWEALTH n 

The purpose of the Public Elementary School is to 
form and strengthen the character and to develop the 
intelligence of the children entrusted to it. 

First character, then intelligence. This order goes to 
the very heart of the difference between the principle 
of Prussianism and the principle of the Commonwealth. 

The Prussian system is unsatisfactory, firstly, because 
it confuses external discipline with self-control; secondly, 
because it confuses regimentation with corporate spirit; 
thirdly, because it conceives the nation's duty in terms of 
"culture" rather than of character. 

"Our British tendency," continues Mr. Zimmern, 
"is to develop habits of service and responsibility 
through a devotion to smaller and more intimate 
associations, to build on a foundation of lesser loyalties 
and duties. We do not conceive it to be the function 
of the school to teach patriotism or- to teach fellowship. 

Rather we hold that good education is fellowship, is 
citizenship, in the deepest meaning of those words. . . . 
A school, a ship, a club, a Trade Union, any free associa- 
tion of Englishmen, is all England in miniature." 

With us, he points out, civilisation stands for neither 
language nor culture nor anything intellectual at all. 
"It stands for something moral and social and political" : 

It means, in the first place, the establishment and 
enforcement of the Rule of Law, as against anarchy 
on the one hand and tyranny on the other; and secondly, 
on the basis of order and justice, the task of making men 



12 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

fit for free institutions, the work of guiding and training 
them to recognise the obligations of citizenship, to sub- 
ordinate their own personal interests or inclinations to the 
common welfare, the "commonwealth." 

In a word it means Character, not a national char- 
acter, but an individual moral character. Our com- 
mon sense has taught us that the most important thing 
about a man is his verity. We are not to be put off by 
smooth speeches or an imposing manner; we go to the 
heart of things and ask what is the character of this man 
who would traffic with us or sit down with our family at 
dinner. Is he a man to be trusted ? Is he straight? Is 
he clean ? Or is he a humbug, a rogue, and a hypocrite ? 

Mr. Chesterton, with his robust love of beer and 
incense, has attempted to make light of the age of 
the Puritans; but he is obliged to confess that in the 
simpler Puritans there was a "ring of real republican 
virtue," and "a defiance of tyrants," and also, which is 
the greatest of all his own affirmations, "an assertion 
of human dignity. ' ' Is it not plain to us, whatever their 
theological extravagances may have been, that because 
their insistence was on moral character these men were 
the essential English of that period? In comparison 
with them, surely the courtiers and fops who surrounded 
Charles II were as little English as the Euphuists 
of Elizabethan times or the alien financiers of our 
present Belgravia. 

The Puritan's face was set against licence. He 



PRINCIPLES OF THE COMMONWEALTH 13 

hated anything that degraded the human spirit. His 
moral emphasis was on the inner life — the inward verity 
of the individual. He raised morality from a matter of 
taste to a rule of life, to a test of value. He was for 
honesty, not duplicity; for worth, not pretentiousness; 
for chastity, not beastliness; for the home, not the 
brothel; for manliness, not effeminacy. If he lacked 
Mr. Chesterton's passion for symbolism, did he not also 
lack the treachery of Charles I, the licentiousness of 
Charles II ? Was there not essential Englishness in the 
challenge of Richard Sibbes: "What are we to think of 
those who would bring light and darkness, Christ and 
Anti-Christ, the Ark and Dagon together, that would 
reconcile us as if it were no great matter?" We owe 
something to the brilliant wit of Mr. Chesterton, but 
how much more to the moral earnestness of Milton. 

It was the Puritan who carried English character 
across the Atlantic, and founded the mightiest republic 
the world has known — a republic still in its infancy, but, 
with England, the world's greatest bulwark at this hour 
against tyranny of every kind, whether the tyranny of 
the priest, the monarch, or the communist. In the 
light of that tremendous achievement, is it not just to 
say that the Calvinism of which Mr. Chesterton makes 
so much was merely the theological accident of the time, 
and that the true passion of the Puritan, distinguishing 
him from the false and traitorous English of that day, 
and enabling him to do this mighty work in America, 



14 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

was the passion for liberty, for moral earnestness, 
for the dignity of the individual ? 

Prussianism rests, as Bismarck, a moderate man, 
asserted in memorable words, on the divine right of 
the King of Prussia. Has Mr. Chesterton, who hates 
Prussianism, forgotten that James I of England wrote 
to his son, afterwards Charles I, bidding him remember, 
"God made you a little God, to sit on His Throne, and 
rule over men." Against that doctrine the Puritan 
first protested and then fought, so saving England from 
a tyranny which would infallibly have destroyed her 
moral character. 

It was the true descendant of this Puritan, we may 
say faithfully, who defeated the Prussian tyranny, for 
the ranks of the British Army were filled with millions 
of volunteers who fought for the principle of the Com- 
monwealth, and who endured the incredible agony of 
that long conflict because they hated despotism, and felt 
in their English blood something that would not bow to 
an Authority against which their moral nature revolted. 

If the record of the British Commonwealth under 
the stress of war (wrote Mr. Zimmern) is less resounding 
than the martial bulletins of Prussia, less stirring and 
fantastic than the sweeping edicts of the revolution, if its 
plans and achievements are dressed in the sober tints of 
ordinary life, it is because the Commonwealth exists not 
to gratify a conqueror's ambition or to demonstrate or 
refute a dreamer's doctrine, but to enable its citizens to 
grow to the full stature of their moral being. 



PRINCIPLES OP THE COMMONWEALTH 15 

Not by the triumphs of the battlefield and the forum 
will the Commonwealth seek to be justified, but by the 
character and the influence, the noble example and the in- 
spiring memory of its men and women. 

That is to say, the meaning of England is neither 
Imperialism nor State Slavery, but Moral Character. 
She is the very antithesis of Prussianism, and the very 
antipodes of Bolshevism. Her strength, power, and 
dominion lie in no machinery of State, but in the moral 
character of her individual citizens. 

These things I have set down in order that the reader 
may carry in his mind a clear idea of the meaning 
of England as he proceeds to examine her social docu- 
ments of the present hour. 

England, still far short of her ideal, stands in a world of 
many diverse doctrines, and a world at many different 
levels of civilisation, for Liberty and Character. She 
means that human nature is a great thing, not a slavish 
thing, a potentiality, at any rate, which may be edu- 
cated in self-control, till it is fit to stand on its own feet 
against all the assaults of the world, the flesh, and the 
devil. She utters an Everlasting No to the tyrant who 
would substitute external discipline for self-control, 
regimentation for corporate spirit, and "culture" 
for character. She utters this Everlasting No to 
tyrants of every kind, whether it be the Prussian who 
would make the citizen exist for the State, or the Bol- 
shevist who would make the worker exist for Economics. 



16 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

And from her heart of hearts she utters an Everlasting 
Yea to the divine demand of religion for truth in the 
inward parts. 

She stands, then, for something infinitely great. 
It is vital to the higher life of the human race that 
she should continue to stand for this great thing, since 
tyranny never sleeps, and the victory for Freedom will 
not be won till all nations have acquired the moral 
character which renders liberty a power and not a 
danger. 

The question we now have to ask ourselves is whether 
those people in England who set the nation its standards 
in morals and manners are helping us to stand for this 
great thing, are strengthening our moral fibres and 
quickening our spiritual ideals, or whether they are 
leading the nation into an ambush where tyranny waits 
to strike another blow at his chief enemy. 

It is not a question, I beg the reader to remember, 
whether Fashion is worse than it was, or better; it 
is a question whether it is a help or a hindrance, whether 
it is adequate to the present crisis in the fortunes of 
civilisation. 




F. A. Swaine 



LADY HARROWBY 



CHAPTER II 
COLONEL REPINGTON'S DIARIES 

We have neither immediate nor remote aims, and in our soul 
there is a great empty space. — Anton Tchehov. 

Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most beautiful souls that 
have ever existed, used to say that one's business in life was 
first to perfect oneself by all the means in one's power, and 
secondly to try to create in the world around one an aristocracy, 
the most numerous that one possibly could, of talents and 
characters. — Matthew Arnold. 

In order to avoid any charge of vagueness or extrava- 
gance, which is the usual defence in matters of this 
nature, I propose to test Fashionable Society only by its 
own documents. The documents I shall use are the 
recent published work of fashionable people, and give us 
valuable information concerning a great number of 
other fashionable people. They have been published 
without shame, have achieved a considerable popular- 
ity, and are acknowledged by the best judges to be 
thoroughly indiscreet — that is to say, truthful but 
unwise. 

There shall be no opportunity for the timorous syco- 
2 17 



18 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

phant of Fashion to dismiss my indictment as any mere 
essay in vulgar sensationalism. I look to startle people ; 
I hope to rouse anger and indignation among the solid 
central classes of England ; but the means I shall employ 
to that end are no fabrications of my own, no exagger- 
ations of a gossip's chatter, no scraps and pickings from 
the refuse heaps of scandal; they are the signed and 
written word of people who live at the very centre of 
fashionable life and who are wholly above suspicion as 
enemies of the social order. 

Since I earnestly desire the reader to keep the War in 
his mind, and to remember my suggestion that our sol- 
diers endured the inexpressible torture of that ordeal 
for the sake of a great moral, social, and political ideal — 
the ideal of the British Commonwealth — we will begin 
with Colonel Charles a Court Repington, C.M.G., Com- 
mander of the Order of Leopold, Officer of the Legion 
of Honour, and author of The First World War. x 

Colonel Repington is a man of intellect — an ad- 
mirable and finished specimen of the intellectual man 
of the world. His vanity, which leaves Malvolio at 
the post, must not blind us to the reality of his ser- 
vices during the War. He rendered this country very 
considerable services, for which we must ever pay 
him the tribute of a profound gratitude. His military 
knowledge, which is of a high order, his manners, which 
can be exceedingly engaging, and his courage, which is 

1 The First World War. 



COLONEL REPINGTON'S DIARIES 19 

proof against the airs and tempers of men in high places, 
faithfully and persistently served this country and this 
country's allies at every crisis in the War. I think 
I am right in saying that only in one military particular 
was his judgment ever at fault, and that never once did 
he consult his own leisure or convenience when a long 
and racking journey, with a difficult diplomatic mission 
at the end of it, was likely to retrieve the mistakes of 
our politicians and serve the safety of our troops. 

Colonel Repington's two volumes are the contents 
of his diaries from i9i4to 1918. At the outbreak of 
War he was fifty-six years of age, had seen service 
in Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, and South Africa, had 
served as military attache in Belgium and Holland, 
was military correspondent to The Times, a popular 
figure in the drawing-rooms of London and Paris, and a 
man whose opinion on military subjects was listened to 
with respect by many of our greatest soldiers and some 
of our most intellectual statesmen. 

In him we see the product of all the social advan- 
tages. Born of the aristocracy, educated at Eton, 
always associating on terms of the friendliest intimacy 
with the great and powerful, a traveller who would have 
astonished the Elizabethans, an excellent linguist, a 
man of taste and judgment, a sportsman in the best 
English sense of that word, and a sincere lover of the 
beautiful, Colonel Repington comes before us with 
every hall-mark of aristocratic genuineness, so blest 



20 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

by the gods, for he is a singularly handsome person, that 
a former generation might have taken him for the ideal 
hero of a Ouida novel. 

Might we not reasonably expect to find, then, in the 
war diaries of a man so blest and so circumstanced, a 
spirit that would help us to penetrate to the heart of 
that moral idealism which held our soldiers to their 
post? If Colonel Repington does not know what 
England stood for in the War, how shall the man know 
who has read only the elements of history, and since 
that day has been too busy earning his bread to culti- 
vate his mind? And if Colonel Repington does know 
what England stood for in that conflict, should not the 
diaries he filled during those dreadful years tell us as few 
other documents of the time could do how the great 
ideal of England sustained English aristocracy through 
that long conflict and led it to such shining sacrifices 
as made that ideal manifest to all the world? 

I do not think it is unreasonable to expect such a 
spirit in these diaries. The times were tremendous. 
Civilisation, as the noblest minds of the human race 
have ever understood that term, was in peril. There 
were crises when it seemed that nothing could save 
the young liberalism of Europe. For months many 
abandoned hope that Prussian despotism, Prussian 
materialism, Prussian savagery, could even be held, 
much less overthrown. Think what that meant; con- 
trol was conquering — self-control was fighting with its 



COLONEL REPINGTON'S DIARIES 21 

back to the wall. An iron hand was closing over the 
soul of freedom. A grasp of slavery like that which 
now holds Russia in its ruthless clutches was tightening 
round the writhing body of this world's liberty. And 
during those months of almost unendurable suspense 
the flower of England's youth was bleeding to death in 
the most frightful shambles that even a maniac could 
imagine. It was no nightmare. The thing was real. 
It was not the campaign of Cassar, Charlemagne, Fred- 
erick, or Napoleon; it was not a campaign far off and 
distant; it was a campaign at our very door; and that 
battered door was being defended by our brothers and 
our sons. Not by the hundred, or by the thousand, or 
by the score of thousands, but by hundreds of thou- 
sands; yes, and in the end by millions, men were being 
killed, mutilated, blinded, and driven mad, then, at that 
moment, in those very days, when Colonel Repington 
was filling his diaries. 

Most people felt this agony in their blood. It was 
something from which there was no escape. It was as 
close to life as the skin to the body. To know that 
freedom was in peril, and that it was being bloodily and 
awfully defended by boys fresh from school, was a men- 
tal experience which could not be dislodged. To shake 
off the intolerable burden of that thought for a few 
moments was possible ; diversion was even necessary to 
health ; it was right, it was just ; but to wish to forget it 
altogether, this was criminal; and to write about the 



22 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

War without the consecration of that thought always in 
the mind, to make the War the theme of two volumes, 
and never once write one single word suggesting even a 
consciousness of that holy thought, the Cause for which 
our men were fighting, this, until I read Colonel Reping- 
ton's work, I should have said was impossible. 

To read these volumes is to discover the unthinkable 
and the impossible. Nowhere will you find a period 
or a sentence of which you could say, "There! that is 
what we fought for! ' ' The Cause finds no expression. 
There is no penetration to the spiritual reality of the 
conflict. It never seems to have occurred to the author 
that the soldier in the trenches might have preferred 
"the trivial detail of daily happiness" to War, but for 
something that held him there like a priest at the altar. 

Colonel Repington met everybody. He sets down in 
his diary what he said to those great people, and also 
what the great people said to him. They were our 
greatest, and apparently not one word was uttered 
which ever glanced below the surface. A Frenchman 
might read this book and exclaim of us, "What cynics ! " 
or a German, and say, "What hypocrites!" or an edu- 
cated Indian, and say, "What animals!" No one 
reading this book would understand that England was 
fighting for the greatest political ideal which has ever 
risen from the furnace of slavery, and that her sons 
were offering their lives in no less a cause than the 
higher life of the human race. 



COLONEL REPINGTON'S DIARIES 23 

Never was book written with greater omission. 
Bagehot censured Scott for the entire omission from his 
novels of an "element which is so characteristic of life," 
religion; but who could write a book about the First 
World War and omit the cause which, if challenged by a 
Second, will surely perish? It is as if the armies of the 
world were fighting for a bone. 

But if we censure Colonel Repington for this grave 
omission, what must we say of the incidents, the anec- 
dotes, the conversations, and the flippancies which 
crowd his two volumes from cover to cover? Take, for 
example, this entry in the diaries under the head "The 
Outlook for 1916": 

Lunched in Belgrave Square. Lady Paget, Prince 
and Princess Victor Napoleon, Mrs. Duggan, Wolkoff, 
and Max Muller, of the Foreign Office. The Princess 
very nicely dressed, and charming as usual. Mrs. Dug- 
gan was in the most attractive widow's weeds imaginable. 
Callaud (sic) of Paris makes a speciality of mourning for 
war widows apparently. These particular weeds in- 
cluded a very pretty hat in crape, yvith a veil hanging 
down behind, or rather streamers, and a narrow band of 
white crape round the hat next her face, and also under 
her chin. The dress had a white waistcoat of tulle, and 
open at the neck, in fact she looked like a fascinating nun. 
Laszlo has painted her in this dress. 

One is not only shocked by such an entry, but 
filled with a dull nausea. Something is here degraded 
which, for most of us, has the elements of sanctity. 



24 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

Such a spirit is here forced before our attention as 
would admit the cinematograph to the death-chamber. 
Apparently, Colonel Repington and his friends were 
occasionally visited by the disturbing thought that their 
lives were scarcely in harmony with the tragic character 
of the times. On one occasion at least this intrusive 
thought was faced and challenged with a characteristic 
logic : 

Lady Ridley and I discussed what posterity would 
think of us in England. We agreed that we should be 
considered rather callous to go on with our usual life 
when we were reading of 3,000 and 4,000 casualties a day. 
But she said that people could not keep themselves ele- 
vated permanently on some plane above the normal, and 
she supposed that things round us explained the French 
Revolution and the behaviour of the French nobility. 

This entry, in spite of its brittle fallacy, is valuable. 
It acts as a finger-post to ' ' the usual life " which Fashion 
considers normal. In the next chapter we will follow 
that direction and see where it leads us. 

For the moment, apologising to the intelligent reader 
for wasting his time, I would point out to those who 
agree with Lady Ridley that her excuse is on all fours 
with the excuse made by the most degraded people in 
our social hotch-potch for their horrible morals and their 
disgusting manners. 

The prostitute does not think of herself as abnormal ; 
on the contrary, she regards modesty and chastity as 



COLONEL REPINGTON'S DIARIES 25 

unnatural elevations above the plane of the normal. 
The crowd of rascals and scoundrels who infest the Turf 
do not think of themselves as "rather callous" or as 
savages utterly unfit for civilisation; on the contrary, 
they regard honesty, straight dealing, and the most 
elementary self-sacrifice as elevations fantastically and 
laughably above the plane of the normal. 

If "the normal" is to be at the sport of individual 
caprice, the life of a community can never escape from 
chaos. There must be standards. There must be 
criteria. The tendency to regard loyalty to one's lower 
nature as honesty, and all moral strivings to obey the 
whispers of one's higher nature as hyprocrisy, is fatal 
to development, fatal to order. The aim must be at 
perfection. The standards of humanity must be de- 
livered into our hands by the highest. 

How disastrously any other principle works may 
be seen in this extract from Colonel Repington's diary 
for February 26, 1918 : 

Lady Randolph and I agree that if we began again 
at 17 we should do the same as we had done, only more so. 
Then we decided that we could not have done more so if 
we had tried. 

The manner is flippant, but the spirit is unmistakable. 
It is the fatal spirit of self-satisfaction. Beneath all 
their frivolity and trivial persiflage, these people are 
profoundly convinced of superiority, profoundly un- 



26 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

aware of unworthiness. They have no idea of their guilt. 
Their privileges appear to them as the fruits of their 
merits, and their merits seem to them so unquestionable 
as to be a full discharge of their responsibilities. They 
think the rest of mankind should be grateful to them 
for their mere existence. That horrible creature Lady- 
Cardigan speaks of someone having to earn her living as 
a governess "instead of enjoying the life her birth and 
attractions merited." Noblesse oblige. As the tout of 
the race-course laughs at the tract of the missionary, 
so these people who ought to quicken the nation's sense 
of its duties, and who ought to set the community the 
highest standards of moral perfection, laugh at such an 
utterance of Matthew Arnold: "The deeper I go in 
my own consciousness, and the more simply I abandon 
myself to it, the more it seems to tell me that I have no 
rights at all, only duties." 

But conscience is the least obtrusive of visitors in 
these circles. When "the normal" is being fixed, con- 
venience, not conscience, is the arbiter. 



CHAPTER III 

SOME GLIMPSES OF THE NORMAL 

What bothered me in London was all the Clever People 
going wrong with such Clever Reasons for so doing, which I 
couldn't confute. — Edward FitzGerald. 

Each London season is as like the past as this year's turnip 
crop is like last. . . . One wearies of the energetic monotony 
which teaches one nothing and loses its power to amuse. — J. A. 
Froude. 

With so admirable a guide for our purpose as the 
famous and intellectual Colonel Repington, we will 
set out to discover the normal life of fashionable people. 
That is to say, we will listen to the voice of Fashion 
while she tells us what she likes to talk about at her 
meals, what she considers amusing, what interests her 
in life, what she thinks of all those great subjects which 
occupy the thoughts of serious men, and what spirit 
animates her social round. 

I am not seeking to fasten a charge of iniquity on 
Fashion, but to discover its atmosphere. 

In perusing these following extracts from Colonel 
Repington's diaries, I would remind the reader that 

27 



28 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

only on the rarest occasions does the name of a New 
Rich person occur in those pages; therefore he may be 
assured in his mind that he is reading of those who by 
birth, tradition, and all the advantages of education are 
entitled to set the nation its moral and social standards : 

We all agreed upon the desirability of cheering up 
and lighting up London; having restaurant cars on trains, 
holding exhibitions, and emulating the French coolness, 
instead of remaining gloomy in sackcloth and ashes as 
The Times has advocated. They want me to move in 
the matter. Mrs. Duggan looking very pretty, and her 
mourning is growing less. 

I need scarcely interrupt the guidance of Colonel 
Repington to inform the reader that The Times did 
not advocate "sackcloth and ashes," but I would 
point out the significance of that playful phrase, since 
it so obviously suggests that Fashion regards dignity 
and decency in the light of undertakers, or, as the slang 
of the day has it, kill- joys. This dislike of anything 
in the nature of spiritual dignity or intellectual serious- 
ness is a marked characteristic of fashionable psychology. 
The reader will encounter this spirit in many of the 
extracts I shall make from the documents of Fashion 
in the course of these pages : 

We discussed some lighter subjects, including the 
Kaiser's pet ladies, of whom he seems to possess types in 
Norway, Venice, etc., as well as in Brussels. The P.M. 
(Mr. Lloyd George) much enjoyed this gossip, and his 
eyes twinkled as he listened to it. 



SOME GLIMPSES OF THE NORMAL 29 

The following entry appears under the date Good 
Friday, April 21, 1916: 

We had tennis, fishing, walking, bridge, charades, music 
and games, and fooling of every description. . . . We 
had a most cheery party, and were all very friendly and 
young. A capable cook and a good cellar did no harm. 
With Ross, Rumbold, and the two dancing ladies to act 
for us, and with Wolkoff at the piano, the evenings passed 
very pleasantly. Ross is a great loss to low comedy. . . . 

We had forgathered to talk German politics, but got on 
to ladies and horses, and soon forgot all about the Boches. 

We discussed the vices and virtues of man and woman. 
Lady R. said that no woman ever loved a good man, and 
Juliet agreed, saying that it was the last thing that gave 
any satisfaction. Lady R. said that man had terrible 
advantages over woman, as he came into the cradle fully 
armed. I said that the woman did, too, but I was howled 
down. Lady Cunard thought that a woman ought to 
have romance and a man a sense of humour, and then we 
tried to define what a sense of humour was, and on going 
round the table we found that everyone thought they 
had it. 

Here follows one of the most amazing entries in 
Colonel Repington's diaries. The amazement lies in 
the fact that the remark recorded was made in the 
presence of a mother and her sons : 

Dined with Belle Herbert and her two boys, Sidney 
and Michael, and Juliet Duff, in Carlton House Terrace. 
A very pleasant evening. They screamed over my story 
of Robertson's remark that he and I could no more afford 



30 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

to be seen walking together just now than we could afford 
to be seen walking down Regent Street with a whore. 

I confess that while I am fairly used to a rather 
brutal vigour of language among certain men of fashion, 
I have never in my life heard such an expression as 
this in the company of women. Nor do I think that 
"screaming" is a usual form of laughter among even 
fashionable women. 

Here, too, is an amazing story to be told in the circles 
of refinement and culture : 

The other story was of Harry Higgins and a famous 
beautiful prima donna. Harry was trying to engage 
her for the opera and she held out for £200 a night. 
"But we only want you to sing, you know," rasped out 
Harry in her ear. 

"Ragging" appears from time to time in these sou- 
venirs d'enfance: 

A very cheery evening. We dressed up in the hats 
from the crackers, ragged a good deal, went out into the 
square at midnight to hear the chimes, and then back to 
drink an excellent punch and sing "Auld Lang Syne." 

Some good tennis, much talk and much bridge. In 
the evening a great rag. We got to bed about 3 a.m., 
and the next night was almost as bad, if not worse. 

"The next night" was Sunday. 

I do not pretend to know the nature of the "rags" 
which are mentioned occasionally, but never described, 



SOME GLIMPSES OF THE NORMAL 31 

in these pages. Readers of Mr. Michael Sadleir's 
novel Privilege will know that in some sets at any rate 
they take a very horrible form. Mr. Wilfrid Blunt 
mentions a pretty dreadful incident of the kind in My 
Diaries, Part II., that extraordinary work which more 
than confirms every word I wrote about Mr. Asquith 
and Mr. Arthur Balfour in The Mirrors of Downing 
Street. But I prefer to think that the rags of Colonel 
Repington are merely foolish, like the rags in a very 
exalted circle, where pulling out the ties of men in a ball- 
room seems to afford the greatest possible amusement to 
gentlemen in a highly responsible position. Horseplay 
is the chief note of the modern rag. Girls are chased 
about a house by young men, upstairs and downstairs, 
and sometimes come in for such a clawing as quite ruins 
their garments. There are minor rags, hardly perhaps 
to be called rags, in which eccentricity plays the chief 
part. Colonel Repington speaks of a house occupied 
by Mrs. Asquith at Bognor, which could hold eight 
people, but into which Mrs. Asquith thought nothing of 
squeezing eighteen ; at this house Lady Diana Manners 
came to stay, and insisted, we are told, on midnight 
bathing. 

The baths have a fine assortment of salts and ointments 
and scented waters for the bathers to select from. This 
reminded Mrs. McKenna of Lord D'Abernon, who says 
that when he stays with a Jew he always pours the whole 
of the bath salts into his tub as a protest against the 
Crucifixion. 



32 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

We discussed Irvingites, taxation, tanks, the War 
generally, and other matters, Lady C. occasionally throw- 
ing in her usual impromptu and startling observations 
such as that Balfour was an abstraction and not a man, 
and that the upper part of his face was like Christ — which 
made A. J. B. laugh consumedly. 

With one other extract from Colonel Repington's 
pages, I will leave the exploration of his book, which 
has many merits, to the reader who cares to compare 
my few samples with the thing as a whole. 

This particular extract brings us back to the War. 
The date is September, 1917, the place Paris: 

Le Roy asked me the inevitable question about the 
end of the War, and I said that I saw no good reason 
why it should end until the Huns were more badly beaten. 
Since nations counted money no more than pebbles on a 
beach, and all would probably repudiate in one form or 
another at the end of the War, there seemed no reason 
for stopping, especially as so many people were growing 
rich by the War ; the ladies liked being without their hus- 
bands, and all dreaded the settlement afterwards, indus- 
trial, political, financial, domestic. 

In this paragraph of the diarist you may discover, 
I think, the germ of that disease which has destroyed 
the moral character of modern Fashion: the disease, 
I mean, of cynicism. The living principle of a cynical 
spirit is scepticism, but scepticism only of what is high 
and honourable, sincere and true, virtuous and earnest. 
As touching all that is low, abominable, contemptible, 




u. & u. 



LORD MORLEY 



SOME GLIMPSES OF THE NORMAL 33 

disgusting, cowardly, or disgraceful to a man of prin- 
ciple, cynicism is credulity itself. 

People like Colonel Repington know as well as we 
do that no great nation would repudiate its debt unless 
actual ruin brought the whole financial structure of its 
civilisation to the dust. They know, too, that for 
thousands of women the absence of their husbands in 
the War was an intolerable anguish, calling from their 
lips night after night, and morning after morning, such 
prayers as Amelia in Brussels addressed to God for the 
safety of George Osborne. They know these things as 
well as we do; in the privacy of their hearts they 
acknowledge them ; but to admit such opinions in public, 
to state them in print, to publish them with their names 
to the world, this would do violence to the essential 
scepticism of their souls, and worse, damage their 
reputations in fashionable circles as men and women 
of the world. 

The normal life of these people is governed by 
cynicism. In their horror of enthusiasm, which they 
regard as vulgar, they have fallen into the pit of sneers. 
They like to depreciate; it is natural to them to degrade. 
The universe has no majesty for them, life no secrets, 
religion no reverence, and the nature of man no illusions. 
They know everything — everything that darkens and 
destroys, nothing that elevates, nothing that purifies, 
nothing that sustains. 

It is from this normal life, this shallow life of the 



34 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

spiritual depths, that Fashion finds it impossible per- 
manently to elevate itself. It cannot take generous 
views. It cannot cherish noble faiths. It cannot strive. 
To climb to the heights, to direct the vision to the 
morning star, to lead the way to greater truth, greater 
beauty, and greater goodness, this would be too exhaust- 
ing for souls enervated, if not rotted, by the negations 
of cynicism. From such people, is it not unreasonable 
to expect guidance and direction? In such hands as 
these, can we expect to see the standards of the higher 
life of the human race held above the battlefields of the 
soul ? From such lips do we expect to hear the oracles 
of wisdom above the clamours and violence of political 
change? 

"An age that is ceasing to produce child-like children," 
said Francis Thompson, "cannot produce a Shelley." 
And he asked society : 

Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be some- 
thing very different from the man of to-day. It is to 
have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; 
it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe 
in belief . . . it is 

To see a world in a grain of sand, 

And a heaven in a wild flower, 
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 

And eternity in an hour. 

It is to know not as yet that you are under sentence 
of life, nor petition that it be commuted into death. 



SOME GLIMPSES OF THE NORMAL 35 

How discordantly this extract rings in the company 
of quotations from The First World War! One feels 
that it has the uncouth Doric of a solecism. One knows 
that Fashion will raise her darkened eyebrows at it. 

If we have discovered the normal life of Fashion, 
and if we wish to strengthen England's place in the 
world, we must ask ourselves whether that normal 
life is helpful or destructive. Fashion may not intend 
it, but her normal life descends to lower levels, and 
pervades the entire organism of the State. Therefore 
her example is a serious matter; for those who care for 
England, and believe in her destiny, it is a vital matter. 

The question, then, that such people who care for 
England have to ask themselves is a simple one. It is 
whether cynicism is right. If right, then it is good for 
all classes of the community. It is good for the Bolshe- 
vist. But if wrong, it is treason in the high places of the 
State, that and nothing less. 

One way of discovering whether an idea is right 
is to see how it works. Let us ask ourselves, then, 
if the philosophy of cynicism works in fashionable 
circles. Are these people useful? Are they happy? 
Do they make us feel that life is worth living? 

If we see that these people are not useful; if we 
discover that they are not happy; if we know in our 
hearts that they have no encouragement to give to 
moral earnestness, intellectual striving, spiritual aspir- 



36 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

ation, or even physical effort ; if we find them to be the 
wreckage of the human spirit miserably dragging the 
chain of their days from the tents of Vanity Fair 
to the wilderness of disillusion; then, truly, we can 
do the State great service merely by removing these 
false captains from the conspicuous van of English 
civilisation. They may be the victims of circum- 
stances; properly known they may be objects for our 
compassion; but while they march at the head of the 
nation they are, first of all things, our enemies. 



CHAPTER IV 
MRS. ASQUITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 

Oh, my God, that you won't listen to a woman of quality 
when her heart is bursting! — Vanbrugh. 

From the document of a man of the world we will now 
turn to the document of a woman of the world — The 
Autobiography of Mar got Asquith. 1 

Mrs. Asquith belongs to that insurgent class of the 
commercial rich which broke into society soon after 
the second Reform Bill, and during the years of King 
Edward's reign completely overwhelmed it. She is the 
more deadly foe to our ancient traditions because her 
attack is not aimed at the primitive virtues of humanity 
— those moral outworks of the social organism. She 
does not come up against morals charioted by Bacchus 
and his pards ; she is certainly no Lais reeling forward in 
the social route to clink goblets with Silenus, no an- 
archist of conduct who would carve "Do as you like" 
across humanity's immemorial tables of stone. On the 
contrary, she is a devoted wife, an exemplary mother, 
and she believes in God. 

1 The Autobiography of Mar got Asquith. 

37 



38 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

Her attack is the more fatal, because it is aimed 
from the cherished centre of domestic life. It is in my 
view, whether she is conscious of it or not, an attack 
upon manners. That is to say, it is not an attack upon 
the moral law, but upon the manner in which that law 
should be handled. She breaks no commandments, 
but will not keep them within "the bounds of decency." 
Nature would appear to have fashioned her with a thirst 
for self-expression so burning, so gritted with the sand of 
a spiritual Sahara, that she could not brook the ancient 
limitations with which the wisdom of society long ago 
hedged about the development of character. 

The path into which her disposition urged her appears 
to have been the path of sensationalism. To attract 
attention to herself she converted her share of the 
hidden river of life into a fountain that should never 
cease to play — if you will, into a burst water pipe. 
To be taken for a personality she had to be different 
from other people. If the world went on its way, 
carrying the taper of modesty through the darkness of 
this human night, she would pin Catherine wheels to 
her front, fasten a Roman candle at her brow, and 
advance brandishing a rocket in either hand. In other 
words, Mrs. Asquith seems to me from the evidence 
of these pages deliberately to have sought notoriety by 
shock tactics. She has arrived at the wall by trampling 
down the flowers. 

She seems to have flung herself quite early in life 



MRS. ASQUITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 39 

against society's spiritual paling of modesty, self- 
effacement, restraint, and delicacy. She broke through 
it completely in the dawn of her womanhood. Since 
then, arrived on the once sacred summit, she appears to 
have lent a sturdy hand to the building of that Tower of 
Babel which is now lighted by so many winking electric 
signs that it remains in the public eye even at night. 
She is, decisively and victoriously, of the company 
known as People Who Are Talked About. 

Now, to some it may seem that this is to bring a 
charge against the lady in language too severe for 
the offence. After all (one supposes them to say), is it 
not natural for a high-spirited girl to desire attention? 
And is V enfant terrible to be regarded as a criminal 
directly she puts up her hair and lets down her skirt? 

This objection shows only the dangerous pass to 
which people of Mrs. Asquith's description have 
brought the public judgment. Tolerance, said Cole- 
ridge, is only possible when indifference has made it so. 

Immodesty is not one of the smaller sins ; it is almost 
the greatest. To be loud, to be ostentatious, to be 
always thinking of self-expression, is not to find a police- 
man approaching us, but to empty the heart of its divin- 
est essence. If a vulgar audacity, a constant daring, a 
ceaseless pushfulness of the soul, fill us with no horror, 
it is because we have become indifferent to the spirit- 
ual life. Nothing, indeed, so insidiously corrupts the 
spiritual foundations of human character as that intern- 



40 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

perate egoism which looks with contempt upon modesty, 
and nothing can be more fatal to society. We can 
wait for a gross aristocracy to come to its repentant 
senses in its next generation. But what is to be the 
end of an English aristocracy which decides for anarchy 
in manners ? Better to go honestly to the trough than 
to sit painting one's face at an open window. 

If you would understand quite clearly what I mean, 
compare Lord Frederic Hamilton's picture of his 
mother, the gracious and beautiful Duchess of Aber- 
corn, with the looking-glass portrait of Mrs. Asquith's 
autobiography. The duchess belonged to a society 
which had no acquaintance with the Vulgar Rich. One 
may say of her that she did not avoid limelight, but that 
she had no knowledge of its existence. She was not 
only exemplary in all the relations of human life, but 
she possessed, like Mme. Roland, "a consummate moral 
nature"; and, like Mme. Guizot, aimed at "an inner 
development of integrity, delicacy, refinement of 
thought, and refinement of feeling." Her exquisite 
manners were the outward and visible expression of a 
vital inward and spiritual grace. 

She could not have written such a book as this. 
The idea is inconceivable. Even if she had been 
brought to direst penury she could not have sold to the 
public the story of her love. Far rather would she have 
died of starvation. But Mrs. Asquith sells to the public 
not merely the long chronicle of her amorous adventures, 



MRS. ASQUITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 41 

telling us who proposed to her and how she explained 
matters to the first Mrs. Asquith, but even a most 
intimate letter of sympathy written to her, by a man 
still living, on the death of one of her children. 

What are we to think of such insensibility as this? 
Here, of course, she was not thinking of sensation; a 
monetary incentive must have been not merely far from 
her thoughts but obliterated from her mind. Yet the 
sacred letter goes in with the rest. How was this 
possible? 

We ask ourselves, did no tears fall upon it? Did her 
hand not shake a little when she turned over the fad- 
ing pages, remembering the acuteness of her former 
anguish? Did she not shrink, if only for a moment, 
from the profanation of giving those words, which had 
meant so much to her, to the printer? All we know is 
this, that the letter went in with the rest. 

Yet we read, "I shrank then, as I do now, from expos- 
ing the secrets and sensations of life. Reticence should 
guard the soul, and only those who have compassion 
should be admitted to the shrine. When I peer among 
my dead or survey my living friends, I see hardly any- 
one with this quality." Notice that word peer. 

Surely there is in this paragraph evidence of a mind 
too heated and disordered for clear thinking. The lady 
sorrowfully puts friendship on one side, and dances 
away to embrace the printer. 

Do not let us hurry past this disagreeable incident. 



42 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

Is it not a just conclusion that Mrs. Asquith gave 
this letter to the publisher because she could see no 
harm in that action? And if she saw no harm in it, 
must we not therefore conclude that she does not feel 
the same compunctions which operate in almost all 
civilised persons ? But she is moral, clever, brave, kind. 
She is no monster. How, then, is it that she did not feel 
those compunctions? 

The answer is — she has ceased to be simple. 

This is the peril of aristocracy, the most deadly blow 
inflicted upon it by the forces which have conquered 
and possessed its territory. All beauty of the heart, all 
grandeur of the mind, all dignity of the spirit, repose 
upon the first simplicities of human nature, the pieties 
which were as natural to Newton and Wordsworth as 
to any of those Suffolk old women with whose cottage 
talk Edward FitzGerald was wont to refresh his spirit 
after visiting London. 

There was a time when English aristocracy made 
its influence felt throughout the whole social organism 
from a privacy and a seclusion which were inviolate. 
Queen Victoria's great duchesses of Abercorn, Buc- 
cleuch, Sutherland, Devonshire, Marlborough, and 
Westminster; the Cecils, the Lytteltons, and the Greys; 
women like Lady Frederick Cavendish and George 
Wyndham's mother, these radiated through the na- 
tional life a spiritual influence which had its source in the 
simplicities of the human heart. That time is past 



MRS. ASQUITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 43 

We c^e a nation without standards. Society's door has 
been opened from within, and we now look through that 
portal upon a spectacle which, where it does not disgust, 
either baffles us or bores us with ennui. 

We could not have a better witness to this truth than 
Mrs. Asquith. She is not evil ; she is not base ; she is by 
no means without good qualities. But how disastrously 
she has lost her way ! Observe that she does not know 
when she offends good taste. She is terribly immodest 
without being aware of it. She dances before us, 
grimaces, curtsies, kisses her hand to the public, without 
any fear that many may laugh and some may turn away 
with a shudder. She seems to be an illustration of a 
derisive phrase in the north, "an owd yow dressed lamb 
fashion." Spiritually she has not grown; she is still in 
the nursery ; her greatest happiness is still to be brought 
downstairs after dinner to amuse the guests. Time has 
not developed her finer qualities ; it has only intensified 
her worst. 

Amiel says of people who snatch their hands away 
from Simplicity, and go their own way to predominance 
and power: 

. . . they do not live by the soul; they ignore the 
immutable and eternal; they bustle at the circum- 
ference of their existence because they cannot pene- 
trate to its centre. They are restless, eager, positive, 
because they are superficial. To what end, all this 
stir, noise, greed, struggle ? It is all a mere being stunned 
and deafened. 



44 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

Lessing said: "Ever so much lightning does not 
make daylight." 

Mrs. Asquith reminds me in one respect of Mme. 
de Stael, who was so restless for a sceptre that she 
kept a twig of laurel by her side with which she toyed 
during conversation. How she fought against the 
advancing years "which echo with hoarse voice the 
brilliant airs of youth!" Moreover, when she lay 
dying, she had herself carried out into the garden and 
there distributed roses for remembrance. The penalty 
of ceasing to be simple is that we become theatrical. 

In order that the reader who has not yet possessed 
himself of Mrs. Asquith's Autobiography may see 
Fashionable Society from her angle, as he has already 
seen it from Colonel Repington's, I will give a few 
extracts from her pages : 

Laura had been disturbed by hearing that we were 
considered "fast." She told me that receiving com- 
pany in our bedroom shocked people and that we ought, 
perhaps, to give it up. I listened closely to what she 
had to say and at the end remarked that it appeared to 
me absurd. 

Here is the description of the bedroom : 

. . . my walls were ornamented with curious objects, vary- 
ing from caricatures and crucifixes to prints of prize- 
fights, fox-hunts, virgins, and Wagner. In one of the 
turrets I hung my clothes; in the other I put an altar on 
which I kept my books of prayer and a skull. . . . We 



MRS. ASQUITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 45 

wore charming dressing-jackets, and sat up in bed with 
coloured cushions behind our backs, while the brothers 
and friends sat on the floor or in comfortable chairs round 
the room. 

She says of herself elsewhere : ' ' Bold as well as fear- 
less, and always against convention, I was, no doubt, 
extremely difficult to bring up." And in another place, 
making us wonder if she understands the meaning of 
the words, she writes : ' ' Nevertheless we were all deeply 
religious, by which no one need infer that we were 
good." 

The question is, not whether she was good, but 
whether she had the least notions of delicacy. 

It is characteristic, I think, of Mrs. Asquith's mind 
that so much of the wit in her volume should be in the 
region of retort. She is a past mistress in the art of the 
"back-answer," and seems to relish it in her friends. 
But reflection tells us that repartee is the language 
of self-assurance, its chief theatre the street corner. 
Experience shows, I think, that retort is seldom the 
utterance of a really beautiful and sensitive mind. 

Here is a significant extract from her diary: 

Mamma is dead. She died this morning, and Glen 
isn't my home any more. 

The reader need not prepare himself for deep emotion. 
The diarist proceeds: "Mamma's life and death have 
taught me many things." Then follows a long analysis 



46 THE GLASS OP FASHION 

of the mother's character, whose body apparently was 
not yet in its coffin. For example : 

Few women have speculative minds, nor can they 
deliberate; they have instincts, quick apprehensions, 
and powers of observation. . . . Mamma was in all 
these things like the rest of her sex. 

I must confess that this shocks me. 

I will give an incident which seems to me character- 
istic of a thoroughly degenerate age. 

One night, as a young unmarried girl, Mrs. Asquith 
went alone to the Opera House at Dresden. She re- 
members what she wore on that occasion. It was 
something conspicuous — a scarlet dress, pearls, and a 
black cloth cape. She tells us that she was having "a 
frank stare" round the house, when she caught sight of 
an officer in a white uniform : 

He was a fine-looking young man, with tailor-made 
shoulders, a small waist, and silver and black on his 
sword-belt. On closer inspection he was even hand- 
somer than I thought. 

The white officer, we are told, began to look about 
the house when his eyes caught Miss Tennant's red 
dress. 

He put up his glasses and I instantly put mine down. 
Although the lights were lowered for the overture, I 
saw him looking at me for some time. . . . 

When the curtain dropped at the end of the first act, 



MRS. ASQUITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 47 

I left the box. It did not take me long to identify 
the white officer. ... As I passed him I had to stop 
for a moment for fear of treading on his outstretched 
toes. He pulled himself erect to get out of my way; 
I looked up and our eyes met; I don't think I blush 
easily, but something in his gaze may have made me 
blush. I lowered my eyelids and walked on. 

It was raining that night and Miss Tennant could 
not get a cab, so she pulled her cloak over her head 
and started to walk home : 

Suddenly I became aware that I was being followed; 
heard the even steps and the click of spurs of some- 
one walking behind me; I should not have noticed this 
had I not halted under a lamp to pull on my hood, 
which the wind had blown off. . . . The street being 
deserted, I was unable to endure it any longer; I turned 
round and there was the officer. . . . He saluted me and 
asked me in a curious Belgian French if he might accom- 
pany me home. I said: 

"Oh, certainly! But I am not at all nervous in the 
dark." 

As they walked along together, this unknown officer 
and this future wife of a British Prime Minister, the 
following conversation occurred between them: 

Officer: "You would not like to go and have supper 
with me in the private room of the hotel, no?" 

Margot: "You are very kind, but I don't like supper; 
besides, it is too late." (Leaving his side to look at the 
number on the door.) " I am afraid we must part here." 

Officer (drawing a long breath) : ' ' But you said I 
might accompany you to your home!" 



48 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

Margot (with a slow smile): "I know I did; but 
this is my home." 

He looked disappointed and surprised, but taking 
my hand he kissed it, then, stepping back, saluted, and 
said: " Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle." 

So the incident ends, with an apology which appears 
to have ministered to Miss Tennant's pride. "Pardon- 
nez-moi, mademoiselle." He had mistaken her for — a 
lady who would go to supper with him. What a 
blunder ! 

But the incident is nothing. It is its publication 
that takes away the breath. Why is it published? 
What is the point of it? When you remember that 
Mrs. Asquith is fifty-six years of age, and reflected upon 
the fact that it served no political or social end to pub- 
lish in 1920 so unpleasant an experience of her eventful 
past, you will agree that there is an element here of per- 
sisting indelicacy, which in a young woman would be 
disagreeable, but in an elderly woman is disgusting. 

You see her nature when she tells you that she 
"listened closely" to Laura's warning about being 
"fast," deciding that the idea was absurd. She thinks 
where most people are guided by instinct. But even 
here she does not think very far. She did not think, for 
instance, in the matter of bedroom entertainments, 
whether it would be "absurd" for the maidservants in 
the attics to hold a bedroom salon — or should it be 
saloon? — with the knife-boy, the footmen, and the 




Paul Thompson 



GENERAL SIR IAN HAMILTON 



MRS. ASQUITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 49 

butler, while she and her sister entertained "company" 
on the floor below. Apparently, however, she does not 
perceive that there is no logic in manners. There is no 
reason in logic why she should not clean her teeth on the 
doorstep. There is no reason in logic why she should 
not make a loud noise when she eats. There is no rea- 
son in logic why she should not dig M. Bonvin in the 
ribs when she goes to luncheon at the Ritz. Nice people 
do not do these things. Neither do they ever ask 
themselves why they do not do them. It is instinctive 
with them not to do such things. 

Mrs. Asquith, however, is a law to herself. That 
is why I call her a social anarchist. That is why I 
say her influence has been ruinous. But she has the 
wisdom of the serpent as well as its tongue. She can be 
perfectly subdued on occasion. She can be demure. 
Is she not devoted to Queen Alexandra? 

She may be regarded, I think, as one of those electri- 
cal contrivances which can pass into the veins either 
a pleasant vibration, very beneficial to vitality, or a 
shock capable of destroying vitality altogether. It is 
entirely a matter of the current. 

She has no delicacy; she is proud of what she calls her 
"social courage," she is always against the conventions; 
but she has a certain amount of tact. She would not 
switch on quite so much current for John Morley, or 
Gilbert Murray, as for lesser men, men of a more vigor- 
ous vitality. 



50 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

This perhaps may explain the really beautiful and 
noble letters of Benjamin Jowett, which appear in this 
book, and even a letter quite astonishing and almost 
shocking which John Morley wrote to the lady at the 
time of her marriage. 

John Morley has condemned fashionable society 
with a contempt as withering as Voltaire's, and with 
an austerity as high as Mill's. A score of fiery passages 
come into my mind. He speaks of fashionable life as 
"that dance of mimes," pours scorn on "that egoism 
which makes the passions of the individual his own 
law," and denounces the man of the world as "that 
worst enemy of the world." Who, in modern times, 
has lent to moral effort, to spiritual aspiration, a man- 
lier hand than John Morley ? 

And yet, how does this great moralist, this burning 
reformer, this impassioned philosopher of history, write 
to a person so notorious for egoism and reckless self- 
assertion as Miss Margot Tennant ? 

He says: "Don't improve by an atom." 

I think John Morley's "don't improve" deserves to 
live in history. 

In this letter he speaks of the people who wish Miss 
Margot Tennant to improve as "those impertinents," 
and says, "I very respectfully wish nothing of the sort." 
Note that "very respectfully." 

Are the great so easily dazzled by a little boldness 
in the small? When we draw quite closely to them 



MRS. ASQUITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 51 

are they great at all, these idols of our youth? I 
wonder if indiscretion is not the greatest of all 
iconoclasts. 

Don't improve ! — and society going down hill at that 
time with both brakes off. Don't improve! — and 
the other classes of the community looking to Fashion 
as never before for its examples. Don't improve! — 
and every philosopher of antiquity proclaiming that 
goodness is something to be achieved by constant effort 
and unwearying watchfulness. Don't improve! — and 
he has applauded with all his eloquence the moral 
earnestness of one who said "the greatest of all sins is 
to be conscious of none." 

It is kind to suppose that Mrs. Asquith tempers 
the wind of her "social courage" to the shorn lamb 
of philosophical innocence. The current changes with 
the conditions. John Morley never felt, we may be 
sure, that Miss Margot Tennant was a woman "whose 
fire would blast the soul" of his friend, Henry Asquith; 
and Peter Flower, we suspect, never dreamed of writing 
a letter to this brilliant chameleon bidding her very 
respectfully not to improve. 

Mrs. Asquith, let me assure the reader, has many 
gifts and graces to commend her. One of my greatest 
friends is a friend of hers, and he tells me that he likes 
her very much. Sir Arbuthnot Lane, no emotionalist, 
has assured me of the same thing. Mrs. Drew, a first- 
rate person, has written of her, if with some criticism, 



52 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

yet also with evident affection. Moreover, there are 
the letters of Jowett in this book to make one feel how 
easily Mrs. Asquith can control her current. 

Mrs. Lloyd George once told me that no one could 
have been kinder to her when she first moved into 
Downing Street than Mrs. Asquith, who went out of her 
way to make the difficult path of Mrs. Lloyd George 
smooth and easy. When Lord Harcourt's diaries are 
published people will understand what that kindness 
meant. I know a few people who indeed speak warmly 
of her; but I know numbers of women who detest the 
very mention of her name. They are not jealous. They 
simply feel that her "social courage" is odious, a 
euphemism for effrontery. 

Her attraction must have been far greater twenty 
or thirty years ago. I think she dazzled people. She 
was the herald of a new order; and even the great are 
not proof against a fresh sensation. Stories floated 
through the world concerning "those extraordinary 
Tennant girls." I remember a discussion at Ascot 
years ago concerning Margot Tennant, Henry James 
one of the listeners. It was the old order holding up 
its hands in scandalised unbelief. She may be called 
the Grandmother of the Flapper. 

In the suburbs it was asked, is she the smart young 
lady of Mr. Hope's Dolly Dialogues ? and also, is she 
Mr. Benson's Dodo ? She was said to have dashed off 
the description of a certain great lady in these words: 



MRS. ASQUITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 53 

"Rectitude, platitude, sailorhatitude." The good 
things not said by Lady Constance Hatch or Mrs. Willie 
James were credited to Mrs. Asquith. And all the bad 
things to be told about anyone were told about ' ' Mrs. A." 

She has now painted her own portrait, and scandal 
may take a long vacation. We know her, not only as 
she sees herself, but as she does not see herself, even in 
her own looking-glass. 

There are certain things to like in her: her generosity, 
her kindness, her truthfulness (not her accuracy), and her 
freedom from snobbishness. But I miss in these pages, 
so full of aristocratic names and proud titles, to most 
of which are appended such phrases as "my friend," 
"my dear friend," "my dearest friend," "my beloved 
friend," the humble name of two people whose friendly 
kindness to her would seem to confer upon them at 
least a title to honourable mention. But likeable as 
certain people may find her, I have now no doubt, after 
reading her book, that I was right in the suggestion at 
which I permitted myself only to hint in The Mirrors of 
Downing Street concerning Mr. Asquith's fall from 
power. And I think I am right in saying now that her 
influence in English society has been corrupting and 
destructive. She seems to me definitely in arms against 
all those graces which are the very sinew of good 
manners. 

Jowett, she says, was "apprehensive of my social 
reputation . ' ' And proceeds : 



54 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

He was extremely simple-minded, and had a pathetic 
belief in the fine manners, high tone, wide education, 
and lofty example of the British aristocracy. It shocked 
him that I did not share it : I felt his warnings much as a 
duck swimming might feel (sic) the duckings of a hen on 
the bank 

— a thing clearly impossible for anyone to achieve. 
But Mrs. Asquith seldom entered the diminishing 
circle where fine manners were to be found. One 
is astonished in going through her pages to see how 
few people she knew intimately, whose influence one 
remembers with a still fragrant gratitude. I do not 
think, for example, that she knew Lady Frederick 
Cavendish, or the beautiful Duchess of Westminster, 
or any of the Hamiltons, the Spencers, or the Howards. 
I do not think that she has been an intimate friend of the 
Portlands, or the Lansdownes, the Cecils, or the Percys. 
When I was reading the chapters of her childhood, 
where she tells us that she loved climbing on the roof of 
the house, I wondered if it ever occurred to her that she 
might end in the basement. A fall is so easy for heads 
not accustomed to great heights. And when I came 
to the last page of this long pilgrimage through Vanity 
Fair which nevertheless leaves so much more to be said, 
I found the following passage : 

An unfettered childhood and triumphant youth; a lot of 
love-making and a little abuse; a little fame and more 
abuse; a real man and great happiness; the love of child- 



MRS. ASQUITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 55 

ren and seventh heaven; an early death and a crowded 
memorial service. 



That final aspiration, which I have put into italics, 
seems to me to justify my speculation in the early pages 
regarding a fall to the basement, and also to justify 
my judgment that Mrs. Asquith's sensational career has 
not been good for the spiritual life of English society. 

When she was a child and was brought down to 
the drawing-room, she would make entrance with 
the announcement, ' ' Me's here ! ' ' That intense feeling 
of self-importance has remained with her to the end, 
and nothing that can be said of her book will shake the 
iron egoism of her character or make her feel for a 
moment that she has committed a grave indelicacy. 

To the end she will live self-satisfied and flamboyant 
in an atmosphere of "caricatures and crucifixes"; she 
will assuredly have her desire in "a crowded memorial 
service," and I do not think it is unlikely that her first 
utterance in the next world will be, "Me's here!" 

One of the chapters in The Mirrors of Downing Street 
which has been challenged by a somewhat intemperate 
criticism is that in which I hint as delicately as possible 
that Mrs. Asquith has not been a good influence on Mr. 
Asquith's career. Since those words were written, Mr. 
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a great friend of Mrs. Asquith, 
has published the second part of his Diaries. r In Octo- 

1 My Diaries, by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. 



56 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

ber, 1909, he had a conversation with Mr. Winston 
Churchill, who gave him the following information 
concerning Mr. Asquith: 

"He will sit up playing bridge and drinking late at 
night. . . . Asquith has gone morally downhill. From 
the Puritan he was, he has adopted the polite frivolities 
of society. . . . He had gone all to pieces at one time, 
but pulled himself together when he became Prime 
Minister." 

Mr. Dillon told the diarist the same thing in 1910: 
"He had been ruined by his second marriage to one who 
was a Tory at heart. . . . Asquith was quite demor- 
alised. . . . Before his second marriage Asquith was 
quite different. . . . He had no pretensions then to 
being anything but what he was, a Nonconformist of 
the middle-class; now he had adopted all the failings of 
the aristocracy." 

Mr. Blunt says: "This evolution of the square-toed 
Asquith, with his middle-class Puritanical bringing up 
and his severity of conduct, into a 'gay dog' of London 
society is to me irresistibly funny." 

It is that, too; but, in the first place, something 
much more serious. 



CHAPTER V 

A STUDY IN CONTRAST 

Ah! if Madame de Stael had been Catholic, she would have 
been adorable, instead of famous. — Joseph de Maistre. 

The two images farthest removed from each other which 
can be comprehended under one term, are, I think, Isaiah, 
''Hear, heavens, and give ear, earth!"; and Levi, of Holy- 
well Street, "Old Clothes!"; both of them Jews, you'll observe. 
Immane quantum discrepant! — S. T. Coleridge. 

It is the misfortune of many to suppose that every 
protest against badness is dictated by a partiality for 
gloom. Flippant people, with their tiresome cliches, 
their incessant giggling, and their little blasphemies, 
have not the least idea that the highest form of wit and 
the gayest exercise of good humour are to be found only 
among the noble-minded. 

As a taste for loud music tends to degrade the ear 
till it is incapable not only of appreciating good music, 
but even of recognising it when it is heard, so the indul- 
gence of the mind in feeble or second-rate humour leads 
at last to an incapacity for humour of the highest order. 
One seems to see in Fashion's appetite for the music of 

57 



58 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

negro bands a return to the jungle, a return to a primi- 
tive state of society in which the buffon was held to be a 
humorist and the inventor of practical jokes was re- 
garded as a master of wit. 

I once asked a lady famous for her mots whether a 
certain royal personage who had often stayed in her 
houses was amusing in conversation. "Not in the 
least," she said. "When one said something spirituel 
he simply stared; at dinner he would often arrest the 
fork on its way to his mouth and inquire, What are they 
laughing at? But if on a shoot somebody caught his 
toe on a turnip and fell over, he would hold his side, 
shaking with laughter till the tears came." 

Let me remind the age that Socrates was a playful 
spirit, that Erasmus was overflowing with good humour, 
that Dr. Johnson poured out capital jokes as copiously 
as tea, that few letters in the world compare with 
Edward FitzGerald's for wit, that Charles Lamb and 
Thomas Hood made as excellent puns as any of our day, 
that Lewis Carroll kindled the sweetest kind of laughter 
in the world's heart, that Calverley and Locker were 
charmingly amusing, and that no comic writer of our 
times has surpassed Charles Dickens for richness of 
humour or Thackeray for delicacy of wit. 

All these men would not only have been displeased 
by the "social courage" of our contemporary Fashion, 
for each one of them was distinguished in one way or 
another for moral earnestness, but would have been 



A STUDY IN CONTRAST 59 

unable to see amusement in the things which now pass 
for wit and humour. 

Moreover, the bitterest and most consuming wit 
of the eighteenth century, that of Voltaire in France 
and Swift in England, had its rise, not in licence and 
frivolity, but in moral rage and spiritual indignation. 
Such wit might come again in this period, but not the 
highest wit of all — the wit which has sweetness, radiance, 
and warmth. 

Fashion, then, in degrading manners and morals 
has also degraded the happy playfulness of the human 
spirit. This is matter for reflection. Life is no longer 
amusing. It is not vivacious, but noisy. There is no 
zest, no richness, no sparkle, no colour, no fire, no 
splendour. It is drab. It is dreary. There are ' ' crazes ' ' 
instead of stability. There is a rush for excitement, a 
taste for cocktails and cocaine, a constant winding up of 
the brain to experience reaction. The whole secret of 
happiness, quietness at the centre, is lost. The one great 
reward of existence, a sense of growth, is forgotten. 

The truth is that licence always tends to produce an 
intellectual marasmus; whereas obedience to law and 
observance of rules string up the intellect to a condition 
of the greatest health and activity. No form of wit is 
more transient than the wit of the libertine. No wit is 
so immortal as the wit of the moralist. 

I will give a few examples of what Mrs. Asquith con- 
siders amusing : 



6o THE GLASS OF FASHION 

... in a good-humoured way he made a butt of God. 

Gladstone thinks my fitness to be Henry's wife ought 
to be prayed for like the clergy : Almighty and Everlast- 
ing God, Who alone workest great marvels. 

"What is it that God has never seen, that kings see 
seldom, and that we see every day?" 

Raymond instantly answered : 

"A joke." 

I felt that the real answer — which was "an equal" 
— was very tepid after this. 

I heard her say to the late Lord Rothschild, one night at 
a dinner party: "And do you still believe the Messiah 
is coming, Lord Natty?" 

These things appear in her book as witticisms. 
They are, apparently, the best that Fashion can give us. 
I suggest to the reader that he turn to the Letters of 
FitzGerald to see the wit that amused a less complex 
period and an altogether nobler mind. Or, let him read 
a chapter of Sir Thomas Browne, to see how loveliness 
of language goes with loveliness of mind. 

One of the charges to be brought against Fashion, 
and it is by no means a light one, is the charge that 
it has depressed the human spirit and degraded the 
natural joy of the human heart. 

As a contrast to Mrs. Asquith, let us consider the 
wife of another British Prime Minister, the wife of 
Gladstone. Here was one whose whole life was domi- 
nated by the highest conceivable sense of duty and who 
was profoundly religious. What did people say of 
her? 



A STUDY IN CONTRAST 61 

Her presence brought an atmosphere, a climate with 
it, all brightness, freshness, like sunshine and sea air. 

You felt her splendid intuition, her swift motions, 
the magic of her elusive phrases, her rapid courage, her 
never-failing fund of sympathy, her radiance, her gaiety 
of heart, her tenderness of response. 

Her discretion as to public secrets, of which she knew all, 
was really extraordinary; she was willing, if necessary, to 
allow herself in conversation to appear almost a fool, in 
order to conceal the fact of her knowledge. 

She radiated tenderness. 

Religion, not forced, not obtruded, but as natural and 
vital as fresh air was, not an adjunct of life, but life itself . 

She had a heavenly sense of fun, but its manner of 
expression was all her own. There was nothing on earth 
to compare to the twinkle in her eye. 

In her^admirable memoir of her mother, which is, I 
think, an authentic portrait of a Victorian lady, Mrs. 
Drew gives some examples of Catherine Gladstone's fun : 

Of a good-hearted bustling lady she would say, "In she 
walked with her Here I am hat." 

Asked to describe a lady's dress . . . after picturing the 
general effect, she paused: "As to the body — well — I can 
only describe it as a Look at Me body ! " 

On another occasion she was speaking about the un- 
loverlike relations of a newly engaged couple: "To be 
sure," she said, "they did sit side by side upon the couch; 
but they looked just like a coachman and footman on the 
box, so stiff and upright, you could always see the light 
between." 1 

1 Catherine Gladstone, by Mary Drew. This book, which presents us 
with a most beautiful picture of William and Catherine Gladstone's life, 



62 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

With a vivacity and a joyousness which would have 
captivated such spirits as Edward FitzGerald, Charles 
Kingsley, or Thackeray, Catherine Gladstone possessed 
a profound depth of inward seriousness which was like 
the presence of an angel. 

It is only when one comes to read Mrs. Drew's 
monograph that one realises what the nation lost in 
Gladstone, and how politics have rushed downhill since 
his day. 

One night as he walked through the London streets 
with a friend, Gladstone turned back to speak to a pros- 
titute, and presently rejoined his friend with the woman 
at his side. The friend whispered, ' ' But what will Mrs. 
Gladstone say if you take this woman home?" He 
answered, "It is to Mrs. Gladstone I am taking her." 

Few people know that Gladstone gave himself with 
the deepest passion and the highest consecration to the 
bitter work of rescuing degraded women. This noble 
passion, which I have reason to know began while he 
was at Oxford, lasted to the end of his life. The dangers 
of such work had no terrors for him. Extraordinary 
gossip floated through the haunts of scandal. Among 
the base it was whispered, "The heel of Achilles!" 
Some of his friends would have dissuaded him from 
labours which almost invited the political spy and the 
social slanderer to destroy his reputation. But Glad- 
is essential, as a well-known statesman has written an understanding of 
Lord Morley's voluminous Life. 



A STUDY IN CONTRAST 63 

stone could not be turned. Every woman saved by his 
efforts, every woman restored to womanhood, every 
woman created anew in faith and purity was a fresh 
incentive to his zeal. And in this work, as in every- 
thing else, Catherine Gladstone was his partner. Mrs. 
Gladstone and her friend Lady Lothian (this fact, I 
believe, has never been mentioned till now) went 
out regularly at night in places like Leicester 
Square, Coventry Street, and the Haymarket, seek- 
ing young girls and carrying them off to homes of 
rescue. 

The story of this difficult and heroic work of William 
and Catherine Gladstone has not yet been told to the 
world, and I can only hint at it here. It is one of the 
most romantic, as it is one of the most moving, stories in 
human biography. The documents, I believe, are as 
numerous as the political documents; they witness to 
the fact that the Gladstones were not content to save 
girls from brothels and the streets, but that they 
followed their history from Clewer 1 into the world, and 
never ceased to feel a poignant personal interest in the 
moral and spiritual progress of the very least of those 
they saved. When time permits this story of the 
Gladstones to be told to the world, I believe it will give 
mankind a new enthusiasm for the pressing work of 

1 This great House of Mercy, near Windsor, embraces an orphanage 
a penitentiary, and a beautiful chapel. The Gladstones planned and 
shared with Mr. Monsell in its establishment. 



64 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

saving the womanhood of a Christian nation from an 
Asiatic pollution. 

Here is one incident to show the dangers that they 
ran: 

Sir Howard Vincent, Chief of the Police, consulted 
Mr. George Russell on a grave difficulty. Mr. Glad- 
stone, he said, was followed on all his walks at night by 
detectives of the highest character, men whom he 
trusted firmly; this on account of the Irish troubles. 
But even the most trusted of men might fall a victim on 
some occasion to the offer of a dazzling bribe. Such a 
bribe was now being offered; one of the most powerful 
and highly placed men in the opposing party was offer- 
ing a large sum of money for evidence convicting Mr. 
Gladstone of entering a house of ill-fame. In these 
circumstances, he felt strongly that Mr. Gladstone 
should be warned of the danger. 

It is interesting to reflect that while Gladstone 
was heroically struggling with ignorance and prejudice 
to settle the Irish Question before it became a revolu- 
tionary question, here was a chief member of the party 
which opposed him seeking to prevent that merciful 
act of statesmanship by striking at Gladstone's moral 
character in the spirit of an assassin. 

Mr. Russell shrank from confronting Gladstone 
with this horrible news. He suggested to Sir Howard 
Vincent that he should consult Mr. Gladstone's secre- 
tary, Sir Edward Hamilton. Sir Edward Hamilton 




RT. HON. ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR 



u. & u. 



A STUDY IN CONTRAST 65 

saw the peril, but not without some fear and trembling 
agreed to warn the Prime Minister. 

Gladstone was seated at his table, writing. He 
looked up as the secretary entered, his pen still resting 
on the paper. 

"What is it?" 

He did not like being disturbed. 

The secretary, making an effort, told the news. 

Gladstone never changed his position. His face 
hardened a little, that was all. Then, in his deep, 
baying voice, he said very slowly to the young man : 

' ' This is a subject on which it has been my invariable 
rule to keep silence." A pause. "But do you suppose 
I did not count the cost, every cost, when first I set my 
hand to this work? And do you imagine that at my 
advanced age, and with the accumulated experience of 
my life, my work or actions are at this stage undertaken 
in any haphazard manner, without full and grave con- 
sideration ? I thank you for your warning. I recognise 
what it must have cost you to come before me with such 
a message. It must have cost you a great deal. I 
thank you for it." 

A slight movement of his head dismissed the secretary 
and Gladstone continued his writing. And he con- 
tinued his work of rescue to his life's end. 

I told this story to one of the greatest men of our 
time, whose whole life has been inspired by a deep 
admiration for Gladstone's moral idealism. "Why 



66 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

can't this story be told?" he demanded. I explained 
that there still existed people who would like to believe 
evil of Gladstone, low-minded people who would not 
scruple to whisper that in secret he was a vicious man. 
My friend thought for a moment. Then he said: 
"How old was Gladstone when he died? Over eighty. 
Was his face the face of a sensualist ? Do people think 
that a man could live to that age with a secret vice, and 
show no sign of it in his face? You tell me this idea 
began with him at Oxford. Why, at forty his face 
would have betrayed him to all the world, if he had had 
such a weakness in his heart. But look at his face all 
through his life! Look at it when he was eighty! I 
don't think you could say it was the face of a satyr. 
Why, it was like an eagle's!" 

Gladstone felt that this work was too sacred and too 
dreadful for conversation. He never referred to it in 
public. Even his most intimate friends were not aware 
of it. Because of his extreme delicacy in the matter, 
there were those who believed evil of him. He knew it. 
It made no difference to him. Not a day passed in that 
long, stormy, and most busy life which was untouched, 
if even by a mere record in a book or a letter to Clewer, 
by this passion of his consecrated soul. 

One of Gladstone's friends, a distinguished and now 
venerable lady, tells me the following story, related to 
her by Sir Henry James, afterwards Lord James of 
Hereford : 



A STUDY IN CONTRAST 67 

On one occasion, when Mr. Gladstone was returning 
from the House of Commons on a miserable wet night in 
November, he saw an unfortunate woman crouching upon 
the steps of the Duke of York's monument. He stopped 
and spoke to her, and asked her why she did not go home. 
She replied, she had none. He bade her rise and follow 
him the short way that led to Carlton Gardens, where he 
was then living. He was alone in London, his family at 
Hawarden. He let himself into the house with his latch- 
key, and found his frugal supper prepared in his library. 
Adjoining this was the room he used when alone in 
London. He gave the woman, cold and drenched as she 
was, some food; he then sent her into the adjoining room, 
bade her undress, dry her clothes at the fire kept burning 
for him, and try to rest. Meanwhile he locked the door 
of communication between them, sat up all night, reading 
and writing, and when the morning dawned, let the 
woman go forth warm and comfortable, with a few coins 
for her breakfast, and probably some good advice and 
further instructions. 

Such was the man who was helped at every point 
of his life by Catherine Gladstone, and not least of 
all in this deep passion for saving the fallen. Of them 
both, when he lay dying, the wife of Archbishop Benson 
wrote : 

Their kindness and thought and tenderness are inde- 
scribable. I saw her again yesterday, and thanked her 
as well as I could. They tell me that what helps him 
most is anything that is said of his in any way helping 
the world. 

Here is a picture of them at the end of their days: 



68 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

It was the habit of their lives to go every day to church 
before breakfast. They enjoyed the walk, nearly a mile 
uphill, in the early freshness of the morning, and winter or 
summer, storm or sunshine, saw them going to worship 
in Hawarden Church, Mrs. Gladstone scattering the path 
with the letters which she read on the way. Not even 
the early cups of tea, indispensable to most people, broke 
their fast. 

At the age of eighty- three or eighty-four he said : " I 
am afraid I must ask you to keep Petz (a favourite dog) 
from coming to church with me. You see, I have to 
throw sticks for him to pick up, and stooping every 
other minute to get one and then throw it is too hard 
work on the hill." 

"They were moved," we read, "by the same ardour 
to gather the very best, the richest out of life. To them 
life was not a thing to be idled and pleasured away; it 
was a sacred trust that implied true and laudable service 
to God and man. They lifted it to a new level." 

The record of these two lives is as fresh and beautiful 
as a bright morning in April. Their friends were not 
less brilliant, and not less exalted, than those whose 
names appear in contemporary memoirs; they them- 
selves were neither heavy nor dull; the temptations of 
the world surrounding them on every side were as great 
as any that now destroy the joy and beauty of human 
society; but there was this vital difference between 
them and us, between then and now- — the centre of life 
for people like the Gladstones was moral earnestness. 



A STUDY IN CONTRAST 69 

That was their strength. They knew, as Joseph 
de Maistre said, that constraint does not weaken, 
but strengthens. Their wit was brighter because 
blasphemy was forbidden, and dirtiness was impossible. 
Their playfulness was keener because their work was 
serious. There was no sprawling of their minds in one 
direction or another because restraint was as natural 
to them as honesty. There were boundaries, there 
were laws, there was a sense of decency. Manners 
were an expression of morality. 

I do not know of any more striking contrast to 
the personality of Mrs. Asquith than the personality 
of Catherine Gladstone. It is striking because the 
similarities are so numerous. They not only filled pre- 
cisely the same place in our national and social life, but 
at many points their natures, their temperaments, were 
identical. Mrs. Gladstone was all rush and vivacity. 
She hated routine. She loved adventure. She was sud- 
den and unexpected. She overflowed with good nature. 
She sparkled with vivacity. She loved life, loved power, 
and loved crowds of people. It was she, not Gladstone, 
who hated the idea of resignation. It was she who was 
1 ' ever a fighter. ' ' It was she who wanted the battle and 
the victory. Like Mrs. Asquith, too, she was wearied by 
bores and paid no attention to the details of etiquette, the 
mere forms of convention. She had ' ' nature. ' ' She had 
' ' social courage. ' ' She ' ' let herself go, ' ' says Father Wag- 
gett, but adds, "It was a charming creature to let go." 



70 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

In her life, too, as in Mrs. Asquith's, there was 
a time when Fashionable Society was bitterly opposed 
to all she stood for in politics, and a time when a Radical 
colleague of her husband deserted the standard to strike 
the blow that meant defeat. 

But how different the two women — these two women 
who were so like at a score of points ! 

Mrs. Gladstone could not have hung a caricature 
in the vicinity of a crucifix. She could not have 
seen amusement in wit that "made a butt of God." 
She could not have published to the world a narra- 
tion of her love-affairs and her confinements. Why? 

Something restrained her audacity, something re- 
pressed the ebullience of her high spirits, something 
controlled her impetuous spontaneity. 

At the centre of her life, deep below the flashing 
surface of her social existence, was a profound reverence 
for the spiritual truth of humanity, a piercing sense of 
the reality of the Infinite, a pervasive humility of soul. 
And so, unlike Mrs. Asquith, who thought and decided 
in the matter of bedroom receptions, it is written of 
Catherine Gladstone, "Her trust in the guidance of 
instinct and impulse was absolute. Already, while 
others argued the way, she had reached the goal." 

It was with her as it was with Goethe, and as it has 
never been with Mrs. Asquith; an inward earnestness 
saved her from all vulgarities, and made her noble, 
beautifully noble, in spite of all her eccentricities. 



A STUDY IN CONTRAST 71 

The youth of Goethe was filled with a thousand 
trivialities — German trivialities, sentimental, romantic, 
and tailor-made trivialities. One reads that record not 
merely with impatience, but sometimes even with dis- 
gust. He is not only a foppish philanderer and an in- 
tellectual prig ; he is utterly insincere, utterly wanting in 
the virtues of the gentleman. 

He himself came to wonder how his character emerged 
from that period, and how his genius survived it. This 
pigmy, how did he become a giant? — this ephemeron, 
how did he become immortal? "Of all the sons of 
genius," says Hume Brown, "none has been freer than 
Goethe was in his maturer years from every form of 
vanity and self -consciousness." How did this come to 
pass? In his youth he might have been one of the 
figures in such a book as Mrs. Asquith's biography; 
in his maturity he could not have read such a book 
without nausea. By what power was such a miracle 
worked? 

Goethe himself tells us that it was "an inward 
earnestness." At the circumference of his soul was 
frivolity, sentimentalism, insincerity ; but at the centre, 
waiting to save him when he would be still, was this 
inward earnestness, this "instinct for self-mastery," 
this feeling that life was a great thing, a high thing, a 
deep thing, a divine mystery, and that the work of life 
was to perfect the soul. 

It is for lack of this one thing, inward earnestness, 



72 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

this one thing which saved Goethe, this one thing 
that made Catherine Gladstone a different person from 
Margot Asquith, that society is now drifting so far out 
of its course. 



CHAPTER VI 

ILL EFFECTS 

It is something to have an influence on the fortunes of man- 
kind; it is greatly more to have an influence on their intellects. 
— W. S. Landor. 

You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly 
words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, 
but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, 
may remain in his defenceless heart. You don't know it, but 
you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow. — 
Dostoevsky. 

For by a word we wound a thousand. — Sir Thomas 
Browne. 

Lest a too indulgent, perhaps I may be allowed to 
say a too shallow, reader should think I magnify the 
importance of people like Mrs. Asquith and Colonel 
Repington, holding it better to ignore them than further 
to advertise their existence by reprobation however just, 
I will here endeavour to show how far the influence of 
such characters may carry, to the detriment of England 
and the progress of civilisation. 

Both these books, the Autobiography and the Diaries, 

73 



74 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

have been well published. Their sales have been prodi- 
gious. Here in the British Islands they have had 
thousands of readers, and in America and the Dominions 
the numbers must be calculated by scores of thousands. 
Both books, in two different ways, appeal to an almost 
universal curiosity; the one promises insight into the 
social mysteries of English aristocracy, the other insight, 
into the political mysteries of allied statesmanship 
during the crisis of the World War. Colonel Reping- 
ton's social gossip, it must be understood, is only a 
comic chorus to genuine information and excellent 
criticism concerning a vast tragedy. His book is a work, 
I imagine, which no serious student of the War can 
afford to overlook. For myself, knowing something of 
that inner history, I willingly confess that I read these 
two volumes with an unflagging interest. 

The appeal, then, of both books is not to be exag- 
gerated. It is natural that they should be read far and 
wide. They are genuine histories. In America, where 
those of us who seek the world's peace must desire men 
and women to think well of us, and in our Dominions, 
where respect and affection for English traditions is the 
very centre of that spontaneous loyalty which holds the 
Commonwealth together, these books have carried a 
very important message from England — a message 
which cannot be ignored or suppressed, a message 
which has penetrated deeply, a message which is not 
likely to be forgotten in our generation, and the con- 



ILL EFFECTS 75 

sequences of which may go on for a period which no man 
can measure. 

I would ask the reader to see that there are two ways 
in which these books are acting on the minds of men and 
women all over the world. 

First of all, there is the obvious effect on people of 
intelligence — contempt of English aristocracy and con- 
tempt of English politics. Second, there is the effect 
on people of inferior intelligence — imitation of our worst 
qualities. 

Both of these effects are bad. We must deplore the 
fact that because of these two books thousands of intelli- 
gent people all over the world are thinking of us with 
contempt; and equally we must deplore the fact that 
because of these two books thousands of unintelligent 
people are confirmed in flippancy, cynicism, vulgarity, 
and braggart ostentation. 

As an example of the first effect, I will quote a passage 
from a review of Mrs. Asquith's book which appeared in 
The New Republic of America. 

After a scornful examination of the autobiography, 
holding the writer up to the ridicule of all his educated 
readers, the critic pauses at the end of his analysis to 
make this remark: 

And yet I subscribe myself a grateful reader of Mrs. 
Asquith's autobiography. I had a few lingering doubts 
as to the great social tradition of English politics, the 
Saturday-to-Monday refreshment of tired statesmen by 



76 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

untiring hostesses, the comradeship of aristocrats and 
political thinkers and souls. But this lengthy public 
dilatation of Mrs. Asquith's heart has settled for me the 
old notion that woman ever could have, much less ever 
had, a suitable place behind the throne. Behind the 
throne of man, as Mrs. Asquith exhibits it, there may 
always be a place for women of the pillowing variety, 
women who really like to stand waiting with the sponge 
and the smelling-salts and the towels. But for an aggres- 
sive personality like Mrs. Asquith, genuine child of "a 
man whose vitality, irritability, energy, and impression- 
ability amounted to genius," this false role of subordina- 
tion has turned her from a beaver into something smaller 
and less pleasant, and exposed her to the perceptive 
as a pest. Had she been an educated woman, and dis- 
ciplined, and yet subordinate, could she have turned her 
life to advantage? I suppose so, as any man might. 
But being a woman born into a society where her game 
was to be charming, and where she had no chance to 
be seriously educated, we find her at the age of fifty- 
six publishing idiocies that Marie Bashkirtseff was too 
sophisticated to utter at fourteen, and never once attain- 
ing Marie Bashkirtseff 's noble realisation that "if this 
book is not the exact, the absolute, the strict truth, it has no 
raison d'etre." 

These idiocies and, one must say, vulgarities, are 
not of themselves important. What does it matter 
how much this woman tells the gaping public about her 
flirtations, her self -estimates, her husband's prayers, and 
her confinements? The thing that matters is to see a 
fund of human nature squandered in horrible heedlessness 
on the enormous trivialities of the privileged class. 

From this perfectly just and contemptuous criticism 
we must infer that there are numbers of educated 



ILL EFFECTS 77 

Americans whose affection for England has been 
weakened, and who have perhaps ceased to believe that 
the privileged classes in England have any contribution 
to make to the higher life of the human race. Such an 
effect I regard as deplorable; coming, as it does, at a 
particularly critical juncture of inter-state politics, I 
do not think I exaggerate in saying that this effect 
is disastrous. For is it altogether unreasonable to 
suppose that if there existed at this time a deep affection 
and a profound confidence between the Republic of the 
United States and the British Commonwealth such a 
great step might be taken towards disarmament as 
might lead in a generation to the peace of the world? 
I propose in the next chapters to show that both 
Mrs. Asquith and Colonel Repington convey a false 
impression of English society, to show, at any rate, that 
there are people of the privileged classes in these islands 
mindful of their great responsibilities, whose lives are 
beautiful, unselfish, useful — people who still quietly 
maintain beyond the reach of the public limelight those 
noble traditions of the human soul which have dis- 
tinguished the English Gentry at almost every period of 
our history. I hope, that is to say, that I may be able 
to achieve at least something in the direction of miti- 
gating among thoughtful people here in Great Britain, 
and in the Dominions, and in the United States, the 
unfortunate impression conveyed by Mrs. Asquith and 
Colonel Repington. 



78 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

Before proceeding to that pleasant work, I would 
remind the reader once again of the great importance 
of apparently trivial things. 

Let him pause for a moment to consider the case 
of Russia. For a hundred years we have thought of 
Russia as a vast military power, or an empire groaning 
under the tyranny of an autocrat, or a country in which 
literature and art were manifesting themselves in new 
and brilliant forms, or as a nation seething with political 
ideas of a wild and revolutionary character. 

These matters were great enough, obvious enough, 
for our observation and our interest. We should have 
regarded a man as tiresome who told us that the one 
thing in Russia worthy of our attention was the lack of 
moral earnestness in all classes of that human chaos. 
But this fact, nevertheless, was the greatest thing in 
Russia ; everything else in that huge empire was in sober 
truth but as so much spindrift to this deep groundswell 
of the Russian tragedy. There was one who saw the 
truth, one who perceived "the littleness in which the 
greatness of human life is hidden," one who prophesied 
years ago the universal calamity which has plunged 
his country into abject misery, and is still hanging like a 
tempest over the uneasy peace of Versailles ; but because 
he did not come before us as a Nihilist, or a strident 
philosopher of Bolshevism, because he had nothing to 
say about the great rivers of Damascus, and insisted 
only on the need of Jordan, because, that is, he was 



ILL EFFECTS 79 

nothing picturesque and striking and new, only a moral- 
ist, a moralist insisting on the vexatious necessity for 
truth in the inward parts — what a provincialism! — 
what a platitude ! — we ignored his message and missed 
the secret of Russia's woe. 

This man, Fyodor Dostoevsky, makes one of the 
characters in The Possessed speak as follows : 

. . . crime is no longer insanity, but simply common 
sense, almost a duty; anyway, a gallant protest. 

The Russian God has already been vanquished by cheap 
vodka. The peasants are drunk, the mothers are drunk, 
the children are drunk, the churches are empty. . . . 

Oh, this generation has only to grow up. 

Ah, what a pity there's no proletariat ! But there will 
be, there will be, we are going that way. 

. . . One or two generations of vice are essential now; 
monstrous, abject vice by which a man is transformed 
into a loathsome, cruel, egoistic reptile. 

We will proclaim destruction . . . we'll set fires going. 
We'll set legends going. Every scurvy "group" will be 
of use. . . . There will be an upheaval. There's going 
to be such an upset as the world has never seen before. 
. . . Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness, the earth 
will weep for its old gods. 

The important thing in Russia was not the political 
government, but the common everyday fact that the 
peasants were drunk, that the mothers were drunk, 
that the children were drunk, and that the priests, with 
their mistresses and their illegitimate children, were 
drunk too. 



8o THE GLASS OF FASHION 

"Listen," cries Dostoevsky's character, announcing 
a truth of the highest importance. "I've seen a child 
of six years old leading home his drunken mother, whilst 
she swore at him with foul words." 

Which was the greater peril of Russia in those days, 
despotism or immorality, an absolutist Tsar or a 
drunken mother? 

There is a despotism in Russia at the present time. 
One of the hungry citizens of Moscow, pointing to the 
Kremlin, said to Mr. Bertrand Russell, "In there they 
have enough to eat." Always there must be a privi- 
ledged class, always there must be masters. Revolution 
can do nothing but displace one authority by another. 
The character of civilisation depends absolutely on the 
moral character of that authority, whatever it calls 
itself, and that moral character will always chiefly be 
determined by the moral character of the mass. 

Do we realise that the "world tragedy" of Russia 
is mainly the tragedy of two cities? The millions of 
peasants are neither hungry nor cold. The change of 
government has meant little to them ; their lives are not 
altered, nor their fortunes. The crushing tragedy is felt 
mainly in the two principal cities of that vast empire, 
Moscow and Petrograd, where people are not only 
hungry and cold, but intimidated by a worse form of 
slavery than ever existed under the Tsars. 

How is this possible? How are a few fanatical fol- 
lowers of Karl Marx able to hold millions of people in 




THE RT. HON. W. E. GLADSTONE 
1858 

From a portrait by Watts in the National Portrait Gallery 



ILL EFFECTS 81 

the iron grip of a despotism which crushes both soul 
and body? 

The answer is that the multitudes composing the 
Russian Empire long ago have ceased to feel the infi- 
nite importance of moral ideas. Because there was no 
cleavage in their minds between right and wrong there is 
now no vigorous public opinion, no moral force against 
which tyranny of any kind would oppose itself in vain. 
Russia has a thousand qualities which deserve the 
admiration of mankind, but lacking this one quality of 
moral earnestness it is stricken with death. 

Of all intellectual shallowness none is more disastrous 
to the higher life of the human race than that which 
ignores the attitude of average men and women to the 
simplest questions of right and wrong. 

"Steadily, silently, the inevitable process of change 
goes on, and neither the individual himself nor any of 
those nearest to him may notice how, in the one case, his 
character is being strengthened and elevated, and, in 
the other case, is being weakened and lowered." 



CHAPTER VII 

THE OTHER SIDE 

Everyone carries with him a certain moral atmosphere, 
which to a great extent determines the relations into which he 
comes with his fellow men. . . . Thus men are continually 
shedding off, as it were, some part of their personality into 
the society around them. And the tone of this society is the 
result, not so much of the deliberate attempt of the members of 
it to influence each other, as of the unconscious action and 
reaction of their characters . . . the whole weight of the evil 
that is in our society is dragging us down, and the whole force 
of the good that is in it is helping us up. — Edward Caird. 

Moral principles rarely act powerfully upon the world, 
except by way of example or ideals. — Lecky. 

It is one of their many deplorable consequences that 
the books of Mrs. Asquith and Colonel Repington, while 
perfectly true of the sets in which their writers move, 
quite cruelly misrepresent English society as a whole. 
You may easily see how false is the impression these 
books convey if you recall for a moment the immense 
volume of devoted service rendered by people of leisure 
during the War. A foreign reader might well conclude 
from Colonel Repington 's book that England took that 

82 



THE OTHER SIDE 83 

great struggle with fun and frolic, and that her one 
anxiety, while enjoying a "good time," or as good a 
time as the circumstances permitted, was to defeat 
Germany in the field. 

There was another anxiety. Never before in the 
history of England did so deep and earnest a desire 
to minister to the soul of humanity move upon the 
waters of our national life. Never before were all 
classes of the community in closer touch. And this 
great labour, so far as aristocracy is concerned, was 
done, not by fashionable people who hurried to the 
photographer in their nurse's dress or their Red Cross 
uniform, not by people who discovered in the War an 
opportunity to display their talents as actors and act- 
resses, but by people who were doing solid work before 
the War, and who are still quietly toiling for the higher 
life of the human race. 

It may help to mitigate some of the worst conse- 
quences of Colonel Repington's book if I set down here a 
few memories of London during the War; a few mem- 
ories of people in my own acquaintance who took part in 
that vast labour of humanitarianism which transfigured 
the national life at a period of enormous stress and 
almost unimaginable sorrow. 

I recall a conversation with Mr. J. R. Clynes in the 
year 191 7. He spoke hopefully of the end of the War, 
and hopefully of the reconstruction period which would 
succeed our military activity. He based his optimism 



84 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

solely on the good understanding which had then come 
to exist between the various classes of the community. 
The War, he said, had introduced the classes into a 
domestic intimacy which was making for an affectionate 
understanding of their difficulties. 

This unity of spirit seemed to him so wonderful a 
thing that he refused to believe the nation would ever 
again revert to the crudities of class hatred. We are 
already in some danger of losing this great gain. 

Little, I think, is known to the public of the work 
done by a body of English ladies to convince the 
soldiers of our Dominions that England cared for them 
and was profoundly mindful of their self-sacrifice. This 
work is eminently suitable for mention in the present 
place, since it took the admirable form of introducing 
the soldiers of our Dominions into the best home-life 
of England — a home-life which some people might say 
had ceased to exist. Its form was purely domestic. It 
was as intimate as hospitality of that nature could 
possibly be. Because of this domestic and intimate 
character, it did more for England, I think, at any rate 
more for the great moral principles of the British Com- 
monwealth, than any other philanthropic work of a 
patriotic nature. 

It is impossible for me to mention the names of all 
those ladies who rendered this immeasurable service 
to the good name of England; the reader must kindly 
bear in mind that I set down here only the names of 



THE OTHER SIDE 85 

those few who are either known to me personally, or 
whose extraordinary influence came to my knowledge 
from actual experience. There was a great body of 
people whose excellent work did not come within the 
narrow range of my own small life, and whose services 
may well have been as great, or greater, than those to 
which, for the purpose of my requirements, I shall now 
refer. These good and noble women will not resent the 
omission of their names from my pages; the gratitude 
of men and women in all parts of the British Empire is 
their ample reward. I am more likely to offend those 
ladies of my acquaintance whose names do appear in 
these pages, since, even for a good purpose, they dislike 
any public mention of their work. But this risk I am 
content to run, in order to convince as wide a public as 
I can reach, both here and across the seas, that aris- 
tocracy in England has not gone over bag and baggage 
to the enemy of Christian civilisation. 

In order that the officers from our Dominions should 
not feel themselves strangers and aliens at the heart 
of the Empire, a number of ladies organised a system of 
hospitality which aimed to be as free from the spirit of 
institutionalism as loving service and a deep concern for 
the good name of England could make it. The officers 
were to be sought out in camps, barracks, clubs, hostels, 
hospitals, and convalescent homes. They were to be 
invited to visit certain of the best houses in London. 
Their hostesses were to entertain them just as they 



86 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

entertained their own friends. And those officers who 
expressed a desire to see something of English country- 
life were to be the guests of ladies in all parts of the 
United Kingdom. In short, officers from our Domin- 
ions arriving in England were to be treated like the 
friends and relations of the very best families in England. 

I will mention the names of a few ladies who took 
part in this work merely to convince the reader that 
the names in Colonel Repington's book do not by any 
means exhaust the peerage. But when I say that in 
Lady Harrowby's organisation alone there were 695 
hostesses who entertained these officers, the reader will 
see how impossible it is for me to mention more than a 
very few names. 

But here are these few names: The Duchess of 
Argyll, the Duchess of Atholl, the Duchess of Norfolk, 
the Duchess of Wellington, the Marchioness of Win- 
chester, the Marchioness of Salisbury, the Countess of 
Harrowby, the Countess of Hardwicke, the Countess of 
Strathmore, the Countess of Cromer, the Countess 
of Derby, the Countess of Glasgow, the Countess of 
Yarborough, the Countess Fortescue, the Countess of 
Dunmore, the Dowager Countess of Jersey, the Dow- 
ager Countess of Clanwilliam, Lady Hambleden, Lady 
Ampthill, Lady Northcote, Lady Carmichael, Lady 
Zouche, Lady Portman, Lady Farnham, Lady Har- 
court, Lady Gladstone, Lady de ITsle and Dudley, Lady 
Dunleath, Lady Hilda Murray, Lady Howard de Wal- 



THE OTHER SIDE 87 

den, Lady Doreen Long, Lady Frances Ryder (a great 
driving force in more than one organisation), Lady 
Mary Morrison, Lady Alice Fergusson, Lady Mabel 
Kenyon Slaney, Lady Angela Campbell, the Hon. Mrs. 
Henry Edwardes, the Hon. Mrs. Hope Morley, the 
Hon. Margaret Colville (who also worked unsparingly to 
trace missing officers), the Hon. Harriet Phipps, Mrs. 
Cuninghame of Craigends, Miss Macdonald of the Isles, 
Mrs. Abel Smith, of Cole Orton, Miss Agnes Bowen, 
daughter of a late Governor of Queensland, and the two 
daughters of Sir Arthur Lawley. 

It would only bother the reader to give the statistics 
of the various organisations with which these ladies 
worked, but when I say that one of them alone was 
responsible for hospitality to 100,000 officers, something 
of the magnitude of the work will be understood. I 
prefer to give a few slight sketches of these hostesses, 
in order that the reader may understand the character 
of the hospitality extended to our Dominion soldiers. 
It was the nature of this hospitality which made it 
different from almost every other form of war work, 
and it is by understanding its nature or character 
that the reader will best enter into a truer knowledge 
of English social life. 

Lady Harrowby, who with her daughter, Lady 
Frances Ryder, and a staff of ladies, did a vast work of 
organisation, besides acting as hostess in many enter- 
tainments, tells me that, looking back over the period 



88 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

of the War, she is inclined to envy Mrs. Henry 
Edwardes more than anybody else who took part in 
offering hospitality to our Dominion soldiers. The 
reason for this noble envy will declare itself in the 
narrative which follows. 

This Mrs. Edwardes is pinned to her chair by rheu- 
matoid arthritis as effectually as Prometheus to his rock. 
She can lift her hands a few inches, and that is all. In 
everything else she is helpless. Never once before the 
War did I hear her utter a single complaint, and since 
the War she is even inclined to bless her illness, for by 
its very nature it enabled her to enter into the closest 
possible intimacy with her visitors. She could do no- 
thing to amuse them ; she could do everything to know 
them. Unable to attend meetings or to take part in the 
mechanism of organisation, this charming woman, who 
has known courts and capitals, and who is so well read 
and so spiritually wise, remained in her chair, and round 
that chair in her drawing-room gathered officers from 
every quarter of the British Commonwealth, telling her 
about their homes, and listening to her good counsel 
with reverence and affection. 

That chair in the drawing-room of Herbert Crescent 
became for me a veritable throne of England, and the 
stooping lady, clothed in beautiful white draperies and 
old lace, who sat there surrounded by soldiers from 
beyond the seas, seemed to me a reincarnation of the 
Victorian spirit of domestic life. 



THE OTHER SIDE 89 

Her graciousness, her exceeding gentleness, her per- 
fect sympathy with human nature, are all strung 
together by a vigorous intellectual good sense which 
gives power to her sweetness. No woman could be 
more tender, none more free from sentimentalism. 
She is wise, but she is infinitely sweet. A profound 
and beautiful spiritual life is the secret of her attractive 
power. 

The reader will perceive that I do not exaggerate 
the national and imperial influence of this good woman, 
whose name finds no mention in the pages of Mrs. 
Asquith and Colonel Repington ; if he will kindly glance 
over the following quotations which I make at random 
from the thousands of letters written by Dominion 
soldiers, and also by their mothers in distant lands, 
which Mrs. Edwardes received during the War, and is 
receiving to this day. 

One officer writes of a most gallant dead comrade: 

Among the papers he carried was a request that should 
he be killed in action he would like one of his friends to 
write and let you know. . . . He told me once that his 
chief pride in winning his decorations was that you would 
know he had tried to make good. 

An Australian mother who had visited England 
wrote to Mrs. Edwardes, saying: 

Because I was a stranger and you made me feel so much 
at home and so very happy with you, I have tried to make 
the girls who are so bravely coming 12,000 miles to marry 



9o THE GLASS OF FASHION 

our Australian soldiers feel that in me they have a real 
friend ; so you see how far your influence has reached. 

No wonder that a South African soldier should write 
to this noble lady in the following words : 

I leave England to-day with a heart overflowing with 
gratitude to and affection for my mother country. . . . 
You have done more to bind the Empire together by your 
kindness and sympathy and friendship . . . than states- 
manship can ever hope to achieve. 

From the mother of a fallen Canadian came this 
letter: 

I hope these few flowers will convey to you a little 
of the gratitude I find so hard to express, for all your 
loving sympathy and kindness to me. All my life your 
goodness will remain as one of the brightest memories in 
my darkest hour. 

It is not given to every woman to have had such perfect 
love, friendship, and understanding as my son gave me, 
and although my pride in the knowledge of his having 
done his duty so nobly is great, there are hours when the 
thought that I shall never see him again is almost more 
than I can bear. 

You may see what she was to these superb soldiers 
and their mothers, and what her gentleness meant to the 
Empire, when you know that an Australian could write 
to her from the trenches as "My dear English Mother." 
A Canadian exclaims in a letter after an action, "How 
deeply I feel towards you and other splendid women 



THE OTHER SIDE 91 

of your class in England!" A South African mother 
writes thanking her for kindness to her son, and for her 
kindness to "all other Colonials who perhaps have no 
mother to write for them." 

What a wonderful work for England! How silent, 
how unknown! Picture to yourself the London of 
those years — the feasting at restaurants, the roaring 
music-halls, the rackety night-clubs, the jests and anec- 
dotes at such dinner-tables as Colonel Repington 
frequented as a relief to his work ; picture the streets as 
we knew them in those days — the procession of motor- 
cars, the parade of fashionable people, the crowds of 
prostitutes, the rush of newsboys, the glitter of shop 
windows, the flags flying from the house-tops, the sense 
everywhere of a carnival in mid- Lent, of a brass band 
in Gethsemane ; all this in the public streets, and here 
in a little house in Knightsbridge, men from every part 
of England's vast Empire gathered round the chair of a 
frail and suffering woman, one of the few remaining 
friends of Queen Victoria, telling her of their homes 
across the seas, their mothers, their sisters, and finding 
in her words a music that was like the sound of a 
mother's voice. 

Many of those gallant men, suddenly ordered back 
to the carnage of the trenches, calling in Herbert Cres- 
cent to say good-bye to the woman who had meant so 
much to them, and finding that she had been carried up 
to her bed, would ask whether they might not be allowed 



92 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

to see her, if only for a moment. They wanted her to 
be their last memory of England. 

In this way it happened that many an Anzac, Cana- 
dian, and South African was conducted to the invalid's 
bedroom and received her blessing kneeling at her bed- 
side. The reverence they felt for her was unbounded ; 
their love for her was a part of their love for England. 
"You have made so many of us feel," wrote one, "that 
England really does care." 

What strikes me so much in these letters from the 
battlefields is their cheerfulness. Men wrote to her 
from the front trenches, in conditions of inexpressible 
horror, wishing her "A Merry Christmas," inquiring 
after her health, and describing a battle in the terms 
of the football field. "I am always afraid of being a 
nuisance," writes one young officer, in a preface to his 
spirited account of a great fight. "I am feeling fine," 
says another, after a terrible battle, "this life agrees 
with me." And another, after recounting the tale of a 
German attack, assures her that "life here is very com- 
fortable." They wanted to cheer her up. In none of 
these thousands of letters have I come across a single 
whine, the smallest grouse, the least cry for sympathy. 
The most that a young Canadian will say after a terrible 
battle at night is the comment, "He is a fool who says 
there is no God!" 

I think those men must have realised how deeply, 
how truly, she felt for them, when her letters reached 



THE OTHER SIDE 93 

them in France — dictated letters, but almost always 
with a few last words written by her own poor tortured 
hand; the hand that was once so beautiful, the hand 
which sculptors copied in Rome — a few words of bless- 
ing and affection. ' ' How can I thank you sufficiently," 
writes a South African, "for the dear little diary you 
sent me as a keepsake. I will carry it with me always 
while campaigning." 

Think of those little gifts crossing the seas from 
this London drawing-room to soldiers of the Empire 
fighting in every quarter of the globe! One is so 
tempted to forget that the night-club was not the 
only form of hospitality which London offered to the 
sons of the British Commonwealth. 

To this day Mrs. Edwardes is receiving letters from 
all parts of the Empire. For instance, an Australian 
tells of his home-coming in these words : " I received a 
warm welcome from all except my own daughter, who 
turned me down absolutely. It took me six months 
to woo her, but now she owns me as her Daddy." An- 
other, writing from Canada of the unforgettable draw- 
ing-room in London, and of the people he met there, 
speaks of "that ideal circle." They all speak of cher- 
ishing their memories, and describe how they tell their 
womanfolk of her unfailing goodness. 

"Alone in London." To those who have met Mrs. 
Edwardes these words have no meaning. . . . We can 
never forget our reception; it was a continual home 



94 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

coming of a long-lost but most welcome son. London! 
— who can describe it? — and the country, with its abbeys, 
cathedrals, castles, country, and farmhouses, its grass and 
gardens. . . . Links have been forged that can never be 
broken. 

One little matter in the hospitality of Mrs. Edwardes 
seems to me worthy of mention. At the outset, she who 
had originated this noble idea of personal hospitality 
to overseas officers decided to permit smoking in her 
drawing-room. This concession was an act of real 
sacrifice. Tobacco smoke affected her health. But 
somebody came to her and said: "You are wrong to 
allow smoking. It destroys the idea of a lady's draw- 
ing-room. It makes your hospitality that of a club or 
a hostel. The men prefer to feel that they are in an 
English home — in a lady's drawing-room." From that 
day smoking was restricted to a room on the ground 
floor, and those who mounted the stairs to the drawing- 
room did so for the pleasures of conversation. As Mrs. 
Edwardes knows a great number of people in society, 
and as everybody delights to do her honour, the soldiers 
of our Dominion met in that drawing-room some of 
the best representatives of English intellectual life, and 
many of the most charming women of the Old Guard in 
aristocracy. 

Lady Harrowby observed the same rule about smok- 
ing in her house in Grosvenor Place. Soldiers from 
overseas found her to be one of the kindest and cheerful- 



THE OTHER SIDE 95 

est women in London, but a martinet in the matter of 
social manners. She does not smoke, and her drawing- 
room, filled with beautiful flowers and beautiful furni- 
ture, is not a smoking-room. She was delighted to 
crowd her room with soldiers, but for conversation, or 
music, or dancing. She showed them a room, with a 
balcony over the street, where smoking was allowed, 
and without an exception her guests gladly acquiesced 
in her rule. 

The truth is that this little rule indicates very happily 
the idea which inspired all this boundless hospitality. 
It was the hospitality of the English home at its very 
best, and to this day, in the houses where the best 
traditions of English home life are observed, no one 
dreams of smoking in the drawing-room, and, moreover, 
the ladies themselves do not smoke. Let me confess 
that there have been times in my life when I have found 
this rule irksome; but let me also acknowledge with 
gratitude how keenly I have appreciated the sweet 
blessings of tobacco after the beneficent abstinence of 
several hours in a drawing-room. 

Lady Harrowby is a philosopher in these matters. 
Her whole life has a thesis. She believes that every 
convention should be challenged for its raison d'etre, 
but that, passing that challenge, each should be reso- 
lutely observed. This is to say, she regards the reason- 
able rules and regulations of society as beneficent; 
she holds that their observance is essential to the right- 



96 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

ful tone of society and good for the discipline of individ- 
ual character. She is firmly opposed to the anarchy of 
licence ; she is a stern unbending champion of restraint 
and dignity. 

Her spirit shows itself in her appearance; she is 
tall and impressive, with something regal in her carriage, 
her manner candid and frank, but not impulsive. All 
her emotions are well under intellectual control. She 
makes one feel how honest she is, how real, how straight, 
how fearless, how willing to be kind and helpful; but 
always, until intimacy is established, the dignity in her 
presence seems to stand guard over the citadel of her 
affections. It is only her closest friends who know how 
loving Lady Harrowby can be. 

The reader might suppose that a lady so formidable 
and strict would perhaps rather frighten the overseas 
Colonial soldier, freed from the awful inhumanity of the 
trenches for a few days' leave in London — the London 
so full of free and easy carnival for those with money in 
their pockets. It shows, I think, how eminently the 
heart of man is domestic, that a woman of Lady Harrow- 
by's character should have made a profound impression 
on her guests. They loved coming to her house. She 
and her daughter (the two ladies are like sisters) became 
in the eyes of thousands of Colonial soldiers ideal 
representatives of English social life at its best — a 
life of warmth, friendliness, and bright good cheer, 
but a life of refinement, virtue, good manners, moral 



THE OTHER SIDE 97 

sweetness, and great social dignity. I mean, these 
men from every quarter of the Empire, and drawn from 
almost every class of their various communities, found 
themselves not only perfectly at ease in Lady Harrow- 
by's house, but perfectly happy in that atmosphere of 
sweetness and restraint, where an attitude of reverence 
towards women was as natural as irreverence in a night- 
club. 

But of this let some of the letters speak: 

We all look upon you as a personal friend. 

I'd willingly go through the black nightmare of Ypres 
again for all the kindness I have received since I returned. 

I am off to France this afternoon, and I really feel 
I have much more to fight for than ever before. 

You open your houses to us and you ask us to your 
table. By doing so you lay us under a chivalrous obliga- 
tion to rise to the best that we feel and know within our- 
selves, and so you bring out, perhaps without knowing it, 
the best that is in us. 

Do not for one moment ever doubt the value morally 
and religiously of your work. 

The thought one has about all this is how to make 
some return. Probably such a return can be best made in 
France ! 

When we get back to Australia, one of the memories 
of England that will be very dear to us, and which we 
will not want to forget, is the welcome that the homes 
of England have given to the Colonials. 

Your reward is the knowledge that you have given so 
many of us "Home Life," kept us straight, and, above all, 
helped to keep the Empire together. 

The other night our Colonel spoke about what the 



98 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

British women had done and were doing. He called 
for three cheers for them, and I wish you could have heard 
it. It was some prolonged noise. 

Finally, let this letter written by an Australian lady 
witness to the relief and gratitude which came to the 
mothers and wives of Dominion soldiers on hearing of 
their visits to Lady Harrowby and her friends. 

What I want to assure you of is the deep gratitude 
we Australian women feel towards those women in Eng- 
land who are good to our boys. Not to be able to see 
them on furlough, to nurse them when ill, to comfort them 
when limbs and eyes were lost, to feel 12,000 miles of 
separation, is breaking our women. They just close their 
eyes and work. . . . 

It is invaluable, your work. None of these men to 
whom you have been so kind will ever again feel anything 
but warm friendly gratitude to English people. . . . 
Deep in our hearts, I think, we all judge a nation by its 
home life. 

In the case of Lady Harrowby's home life, its business 
activity must have impressed the Dominion soldier. 
Lady Frances Ryder, for example, was not only the 
principal driving force in her mother's work of organis- 
ing hospitality, but she was also secretary to the A. D. 
M. S. of Australia in the matter of convalescent leave 
for officers of the A. I. F. and exercised the greatest 
personal care in finding suitable hostesses in all specially 
difficult cases. Her activity was the wonder of her 
friends and the admiration of the Dominion soldiers. 



THE OTHER SIDE 99 

It is characteristic of Lady Harrowby that she makes 
light of her own share in this work. She ascribes all 
the glory to the hosts and hostesses who received 
Dominion officers into their country houses and enter- 
tained them for days and weeks. She says that she was 
merely the secretary of this tremendous work, too 
absorbed in organisation, too busy finding hostesses all 
over the country, to become in any real sense a friend 
of so many men. But there are some people who make 
a deep impression on our minds merely by the moral 
atmosphere which surround them, merely by the sense 
of goodness and sweetness which emanates from their 
presence; and Lady Harrowby, for all her strenuous 
work of organisation, being one of those well-poised 
spirits whom no crisis can overset, no emergency can 
fuss, had only to appear in her drawing-room, only to 
pass through an apartment filled with soldiers from 
France, only to smile upon her guests, to touch their lives 
with a grace which they welcomed. The letters of 
officers from all parts of the Empire speak again and 
again of this gratitude for her personal kindness, and 
one perceives all through these letters a feeling of pride 
and gladness that Lord and Lady Harrowby treated 
their writers as rational and moral beings, not as mere 
children to be amused, and deemed them worthy of a 
friendship which never descended to the easy levels 
below intellectual and spiritual refinement. 

Mr. Charles Hill, a devoted and self-sacrificing 



ioo THE GLASS OF FASHION 

worker, who paid thousands of visits to hospitals, 
convalescent homes, and hostels, seeking for Dominion 
soldiers, and who came into contact with many of the 
ladies in Lady Harrowby's organisation, told me a story 
which illustrates the difficulties encountered by these 
ladies in entertaining their guests. 

He said to me: "I was once visiting the Third Lon- 
don Hospital at Wandsworth, speaking of a visit that I 
was organising to Apsley House. A young officer said 
to me, 'I'd like to go there awfully, for my great-grand- 
father was an ensign at Waterloo!' Unfortunately, 
when the day came, he was too ill for the outing. 

' ' I mentioned the matter to Lady Hilda Murray, who 
spends her whole day in doing kindnesses, and is never 
too busy to do an extra one — I don't know how she 
manages it. The idea of this descendant of a Waterloo 
ensign touched her. She told me later that she had 
arranged for him to visit Apsley House, and that Lady 
Eileen Orde would be there to show him over alone. I 
could not go on that day, for I was taking a party down 
to Penshurst, but I showed the boy where the house 
stood, told him how lucky he was, and explained that 
he had only to ring the bell of Apsley House to see all its 
contents, including the wonderful museum. 

"On my return in the evening I encountered this 
young officer. I asked him how he had enjoyed his visit. 
He replied that he hadn't gone. He made a blushing 
excuse, something about not having noticed how time 



THE OTHER SIDE 101 

was going till the clock struck twelve. I asked him if 
he had telephoned to Lady Eileen. No. Had he tele- 
graphed? No. Ought he to have done so? he asked. 
The truth is, the poor boy, dying to go, was too nervous 
to face a great house alone. Many of them, asked to a 
London house, got no further than the door. We had 
to take them and introduce them to their hostesses. 
Once the ice was broken, they were perfectly at their 
ease, and went again and again. But the shyness of 
these great strong lads was something to wonder at. A 
duchess seemed to them ever so much more alarming 
than a battery of German guns. Their modesty was 
really charming." 

It was the naturalness, rather than the tact, of our 
best English ladies which won the confidence of these 
young giants. They did not want rackety women. 
They were not seeking the Bohemianism of the "smart 
set." They wanted home life at its zenith, home life as 
centuries of noble traditions have made it, and once 
past its imposing portals, once introduced into the 
natural sweetness of that interior, they were at their 
ease. None of them ever lost his reverence for our best 
women, but all were surprised to find how friendly and 
gracious a thing is human excellence. 

Of one woman, Mrs. Graham Murray, who gave 
herself up to this work with an extreme of self-sacrifice, I 
should like to make a particular mention. Mrs. Gra- 
ham Murray presided over the destinies of Peel House, 



102 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

which was used as a club for private soldiers from our 
Dominions. She lived there. It contained 600 beds. 
Occasionally it was a little noisy. She maintained 
an absolute hold, however, over the affections of her 
lodgers. She organised for these men visits to cathe- 
drals under the care of architects, arranged river picnics 
for them, got them tickets for theatres, sent them sight- 
seeing all over London. Worked to death, she would, 
nevertheless, go off at the call of the telephone to play 
the piano for officers from the Dominions who wanted to 
dance in one of the big London houses. Very often, in 
the small hours of the morning, she would find no taxi- 
cab to take her back to Peel House, and would have to 
drag herself there all the way on foot. 

Once, tired out and fit for nothing, she saw an intoxi- 
cated Colonial soldier in Regent Street, arguing with a. 
policeman, and in peril of the sharks of the street. She 
went to him, got him away, and persuaded him to let 
her lead him to Peel House. At the end of the dreary 
walk the maudlin soldier thanked her for seeing him 
home, and offered her sixpence. The scandalised 
doorkeeper intervened. "Do you know who that lady 
is?" "No." "It's the Honourable Mrs. Graham 
Murray!" The soldier plunged his hand into his 
pocket. "Well, give her a pound!" he said, and 
dragged out a grubby note. 

Mrs. Graham Murray worked like a slave for this 
country's good name during the War, and her quite 



THE OTHER SIDE 103 

splendid and continuous service made less noise in the 
world than one of the charity bazaars at Albert Hall, 
where Fashion played at being unselfish. 

If I had the space, I should like to write about the 
work for Overseas War Guests, notably the club at 
Norfolk House, most generously given by the Duchess 
of Norfolk, for ladies from our Dominions. This club 
numbered 3,300 guests; there was no subscription, con- 
certs and lectures were given free, meals were served at 
cost price. The members, gathered from every part of 
the Empire, greatly valued the historic character of their 
splendid premises, and invited their men-folk to vari- 
ous entertainments in those beautiful rooms. But this 
work, linked up with hospitality to Dominion officers, 
and homes for women workers from the Dominions, 
deserves a volume to itself. It was one of the really 
great works done for the Empire — great because it had 
the touch of domesticity ; it brought the women of the 
Empire together as nothing else could have done. 

Among other women of my acquaintance who did not 
play at war work, but who threw themselves into this 
work with a sincere devotion and who are still doing 
work of national importance, are Miss Meriel Talbot, 
Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, and Lady Sybil Grey, figures 
almost unknown in plutocratic circles, but English- 
women of the first class, all of them with an intimate 
knowledge of the British Empire. 

It is instructive to observe that the spirit of war 



104 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

work still continues to animate the activities of good 
women. Lady Hilda Murray, one of the most charm- 
ing people in London, is as energetic as ever in her work 
of imperial consolidation ; and Lady Frances Ryder has 
an organisation for showing personal hospitality, both 
in London and the country, to the great number of 
Dominion students now in England. Lady Limerick 
has set up an Ex-Service Men's Club in Dartford, in 
Kent, which might well serve as a model to every city 
and town throughout the country. 

Lady Limerick's wonderful work during the War 
deserves something more than a passing reference. She 
is one of those impulsive and emotional women, who at 
first slightly disturb the habitual placidity of the Anglo- 
Saxon, but after a little while her absolute self-abne- 
gation, her utter devotion to other people, and her 
tumultuous enthusiasm for all that is kindly and warm 
and generous, rather sweeps one away, and makes one 
wonder whether our political problems would not sur- 
render to solution more quickly and easily if we 
approached them in this liberal spirit of loving-kindness. 
Perhaps we are too cold, too formal, too afraid of trust- 
ing our intellects, of which we are not very sure, in a 
strong tide of genuine emotion. 

At the outset of War, Lady Limerick had a personal 
encounter with a soldier at Victoria Station which led 
her to think of giving all her time to these men. Miss 
Hildyard, soon after this event, began a work of hospit- 



THE OTHER SIDE 105 

ality at this station; before Lady Limerick could take 
any part in it, Mrs. Matthews had set a great machinery 
in motion which never ceased to run till the end of the 
War. Accordingly, Lady Limerick went off to London 
Bridge with her friend Mrs. Butler, and in this windiest 
of London stations, with its high levels and low levels, 
its endless stairs and its winding passages, set up a 
free buffet for soldiers, which became one of the friendli- 
est things on the home front. At the end of the War 
she had ministered to seven and a half million soldiers. 

This gigantic undertaking, so easily forgotten, so 
difficult to maintain, was carried on from beginning 
to end with only one paid worker, a charwoman. 
Among those who gave their services, and worked like 
galley slaves by day and by night, one relief missing 
luncheon, the other dinner, were many of the first 
women in the land. I can find room to name only a 
few of these devoted ladies, who were on their feet for 
long hours, and who had no fire to warm them in winter, 
and whose snatched meals consisted chiefly of tea and 
sandwiches. Lady Limerick would place first on her 
list Queen Alexandra, because the occasional presence 
of this gracious lady not only put heart into her staff, 
but gave such extraordinary pleasure to the soldiers 
coming and going from the front. Their cheers for 
Queen Alexandra, she tells me, ring in her ears to this 
day. 

Among the other ladies, some of whom never missed a 



io6 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

single day all those years, were Lady Evelyn Farquhar 
(who greatly distinguished herself during a bad 
air raid), Miss Sonia Keppel (a most devoted worker), 
Lady Betty Butler, Lady Hugh Grosvenor, Lady 
Lister-Kaye, Lady Poultney, Lady Rossmore, Lady 
Evelyn Ward, Lady Milbanke, Lady Bingham, the 
Hon. Mrs. John Ward, and many other ladies too 
numerous to mention. Their great work never failed. 
The free buffet at London Bridge became a real memory 
in the life of seven and a half million soldiers ; the spirit 
of it was so warm and so friendly. 

Lady Limerick once had a slight altercation with 
a staff colonel, who seemed to resent her motherly man- 
ner with soldiers, not knowing who she was or anything 
of her work. "Ah!" she cried, with mock derision, 
"you're too English to feel like a human being." "I'm 
from Tipperary," said the colonel. "Are you, 
though ? " "I am. " " Well, then, 'tis a long time since 
you were there." At the end of all her disputes she has 
the habit of saying, ' ' Me name's Limerick, and I'm from 
Ireland, though you mightn't think it from me accent." 
A great-hearted, motherly woman, on whom sorrow 
has rained the most terrible sufferings, but whose 
spirit is unbowed, and whose heart is full of the music 
of humanity. 

I will conclude this chapter with a reference to work 
of quite a different kind, a branch of which was carried 
on during the War by Mrs. John Thynne, and is still 



THE OTHER SIDE 107 

being carried on — the work of rescuing fallen women. 
I remember going to Mrs. Thynne's house during the 
War, and meeting there her friend, Princess Christian, 
and several other people gathered together to discuss 
this most difficult question. Not all the terrible 
distractions of the struggle in France could deflect Mrs. 
Thynne from this narrow path of duty which she has 
faithfully and most courageously followed for fifty 
years. The War rendered her work more difficult, 
more heart-breaking, but Mrs. Thynne and her friends 
were determined to meet the increased difficulties by 
extra efforts and extra courage. 

It is interesting to know that Mrs. Thynne was 
drawn into this work as a young bride in 1873 by 
Lady Augusta Stanley, of whom Mr. Birrell gives 
us a momentary glance in his charming monograph 
on Frederick Locker-Lampson. Lady Augusta was 
characteristically English in the central seriousness 
of character from which radiated all her social bright- 
ness. The argument she used to the beautiful Mrs. 
Thynne was a simple one ; it is the duty of happy mar- 
ried women to help girls who are forlorn and friendless 
— happiness is a responsibility. In this way it came 
about that one of the sweetest young brides in London 
was to be seen in the seventies moving through the 
shadows of London midnight streets, speaking to fallen 
women, and taking those who would come with her to 
houses of rescue. And from that day to this, with 



108 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

scores of women definitely saved from destruction by 
her efforts, Mrs. Thynne has never abandoned her la- 
bour of love. 

The Gladstones had long been at this work; perhaps 
it was through them that Lady Edward Cavendish and 
Lady Sarah Spencer, unknown to their parents, would 
go to their rooms in the midst of a great reception at 
Devonshire House, or after a dinner-party, and change 
their fine frocks for dark garments, and then steal out 
into the streets to attempt the rescue of fallen women. 
Mrs. Thynne knows this to be true, and a great friend 
of mine who scouted it at first has since confirmed it. 
Mrs. Thynne tells me that many great ladies gave 
themselves to this bitter work, but in most cases did 
it in secret. 

She tells me of the help she herself received from 
Adeline, Duchess of Bedford, who visited prisons, 
and sought by preventive work of many kinds to 
stem the tide of harlotry. I knew the duchess, and 
know how good she was, and I am quite certain she 
laboured heart and soul in this direction ; but, unhappily 
she lacked the beautiful naturalness of her sister, Lady 
Henry Somerset, and had none of that gentle sweetness 
which makes Mrs. Thynne irresistible. Her influence 
in society would have been far greater if she had pos- 
sessed something of the richness of Lady Limerick's 
emotionalism. She was a good woman, but her nature, 
not her heart, was cold. She could never give herself; 



THE OTHER SIDE 109 

her life, yes, but not herself. Perhaps it was an inner 
timidity that held her captive. 

Among the other people whose preventive work 
during the War saved thousands of young girls from 
ruin, Mrs. Thynne mentions the Dowager Lady Hilling- 
don, Francis Lady de ITsle and Dudley, Lady St. Cyres, 
and the Duchess of Atholl, all of whom saw to it that no 
red tape encumbered their ministrations. To these 
ladies, of whose activities the public knows nothing, we 
owe it that many thousands of girl war-workers were 
brought into close personal contact with influences of a 
pure and refining nature. No statistics of such work 
can tell its story. The nation may be certain, however, 
that because of these good women, purity held its own at 
a time when no immodesty seemed greatly to matter. 

How little we know of the goodness in the world! 
The other day, lunching at St. James's Palace, I met 
an elderly gentleman whom I had often seen before, 
but to whom I had never been introduced. I knew him 
as one who goes about a good deal, and is warmly liked 
by his Eton contemporaries, in whose houses he is a con- 
stant guest. This elderly gentleman, may I be allowed 
to say, is remarkable for no gifts ; he is not a brilliant 
conversationalist, has no store of anecdotes and quota- 
tions at his command, is not in any sense of the word a 
' ' performer. " He is remarkable only for a singular benig- 
nity of manner and a charming kindliness of expression. 

A friend of mine to whom I happened to mention this 



no THE GLASS OF FASHION 

encounter asked me if I knew about Mr. — 's life, and 
then told me the following story : 

"He lives alone in a little street which has many 
shabby corners, looked after by an old butler and an old 
cook, who have been with him for forty years. He 
used . to give the most charming little dinners, but 
taxation and the high price of things have put an end to 
this hospitality. But the War did not put an end to his 
other kindnesses. He has a district in Whitechapel 
which he visits regularly, calling on old people in their 
little houses, just as he calls on ladies in this part of the 
town. He does not preach, distribute tracts, or argue 
as a political propagandist ; he is a social visitor to these 
old bodies, calling to inquire after their health and 
patiently listening to their gossip. Once every week he 
takes a blind man for a walk. There is a hospital in 
London to which he goes to talk to the patients who 
have no visitors. He has been a constant friend to St. 
Dunstan's. Very few people in London know anything 
about this part of his life. They simply regard him as a 
charming old bachelor, who has looked on at the pageant 
of social life from a snug corner. But he is really one 
of the kindest and most unselfish of men — a lovable 
man, full of gentleness and sympathy." 

What a portrait of an English gentleman ! 

As I think of all the good work done during and 
since the War — think of Sir Arthur Pearson's work 



THE OTHER SIDE in 

for blind soldiers and blind children — I feel that this 
chapter will never come to an end. Yet I must turn to 
my main subject, which is constructive criticism, 
though I have mentioned but a tithe of all that devoted 
service. 

In concluding this chapter, however, I would like to 
pay tribute to the zeal and self-sacrificing labours of 
those ladies who never wearied in bringing consolation 
and assistance to the widows of fallen officers, young 
women often left suddenly without a friend in the world, 
or a shilling in their purses. Among these ministering 
women were Lady Lansdowne, Lady Hope (daughter of 
the beautiful and witty Lady Constance Leslie) and 
Mrs. Brinton, better known as Mrs. William James. 
Mrs. Brinton truly worked like a Trojan, and I know 
how often she went long journeys at great trouble and 
expense to comfort some poor young mother left sud- 
denly destitute. But she likes to hide her personal 
work, and to ascribe the increasing success of the 
Officers' Families Association to the businesslike chair- 
manship of Princess Christian, and to the devotion of 
ladies like Mrs. Austen Chamberlain who serve on 
the committee. Homes are provided for these widows 
and their babies at a merely nominal rent, and the 
Association does all that is possible in the matter of 
educating the children. Perhaps something of the 
tragedy of this work may be realised when it is known 
that many widows of young officers found themselves 



112 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

without a penny to buy mourning, their pay stopped, 
their pensions not granted. This great work, carried 
on throughout the War, is still being carried on with 
devotion and personal sacrifice. 

But now I really must turn this page — so delightful 
to write, but so inadequate to the labours it attempts 
to describe if only in the finest of thin outlines. The 
reader in foreign countries, particularly, I hope, in the 
United States, will agree with me, however, in spite of 
this sketchiness, that there is a side to English society 
which is neither base nor contemptible. 

In my conclusion to this book I am going to argue 
that goodness is not enough, and to suggest that the 
Aristotelian idea of a Higher Excellence than morality 
is essential to the development of a true and powerful 
aristocracy. But for the present I seek only to undo, as 
far as it is possible so late in the day, some of the ill con- 
sequences of books like Mrs. Asquith's and Colonel 
Repington's, not pretending for a moment that English 
aristocracy meets the full needs of the time, but con- 
tending that it is not wholly false to its traditions and 
not wholly unmindful of its duties. 



CHAPTER VIII 

MANNERS 

Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, 
their manners, the very tones of their voices; look at them atten- 
tively; observe the literature they read, the things which give 
them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, 
the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would 
any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that 
one was to become just like these people by having it? — Mat- 
thew Arnold. 

Let us now return to our study of Fashion, seeking to 
discover in what respects it fails the English people, and 
does harm to the orderly evolution of English 
civilisation. 

Lady Frances Balfour declared of Mrs. Asquith's 
book that "licence in manners must not be confused 
with a licence in morals"; and I suppose the vast 
majority of people will agree with her in thus separating 
morals from manners, and thus degrading manners 
below the level of morals. 

Nevertheless, this condition of mind is fatal to human 
progress. 

To suggest that morals are more important than 

8 113 



114 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

manners is equivalent to asserting that the Greek 
alphabet is more important than the Dialogues of Plato. 
Morals are the study of the kindergarten. They pro- 
ceed out of lessons on the use of tooth-brush and flannel. 
When we teach men not to steal, and not to murder, we 
are instructing them only in the elements of conduct. 
The Sermon on the Mount was not a plagiarism of Sinai 
nor a paraphrase of the Tables of Stone; it was in an 
altogether different region — it was a discourse on 
manners. 

It is when we have left the kindergarten of the 
moral life, and have entered the university of the 
spiritual life, that we proceed from the Ten Command- 
ments to gentleness, mercy, humility, sweetness, self- 
abnegation, love; and not until we have graduated in 
manners may we call ourselves without absurdity citi- 
zens of civilisation. 

Many people have been shocked by Nietzsche's 
statement that if the kingdom of righteousness and 
peace was established on earth, it would mean ' ' a king- 
dom of the profoundest mediocrity and Chinaism." 
But a greater than Nietzsche said the same thing. 
The righteousness of the Pharisee was condemned by 
Jesus, perfect as that righteousness was, because it 
could lead only to stagnation — that is to say, to medi- 
ocrity and Chinaism. 

To announce "Here is the law, and obedience to the 
law satisfies the universe," is to close the one door on 



MANNERS 115 

earth which life has been able to keep open for the 
eternal struggle after infinite improvement. It is neces- 
sary, if that one door on earth is to be kept open, to say, 
"Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is per- 
fect." Man can no more stop at morality than the 
elephant can go forward to mathematics or music. 
It is essential to the whole scheme of things that man 
should have an open road for his progress. When he 
has learned not to rob his neighbour, and not to kill 
those who possess things which he covets, he has 
passed from the savage, but has by no means reached 
manhood. The police-court is not a rehearsal of the 
Judgment Day, nor is the gate of heaven guarded by 
an official from Scotland Yard. 

All indistinctly apprehend a bliss 
On which the soul may rest ; the hearts of all 
Yearn after it, and to that wished bourne 
All therefore strive. 

Because of the grave importance of this matter, 
I hope I may be forgiven if I express the hope that 
the Prince of Wales, who can do so much for the nation 
if he will take the next step on the road to spiritual 
development, will not mistake popularity for influence. 
It is of high importance to the Empire that his staff 
should consist of men whose intelligence is equal to 
their social position. To be charming is a great power, 
and a tremendous responsibility. With his nature, 



n6 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

which is so attractive, the Prince may do a great deal 
to save society from a grave disaster. He will best 
serve the nation in this way if he makes friends only 
among the best men and women of the day, its scholars 
and its workers, those people whose lives are devoted 
to the highest interests of the human race, and whose 
culture entitles them to be the leaders of English 
civilisation. It is possible, perhaps, for a Prince of 
Wales to be too familiar a figure, too often the centre 
of a vast crowd ; certainly it is of high importance that 
he should have the most ample leisure for conversation 
with the first minds of the world. From him, more 
than from anybody of our time, is the next generation 
likely to draw its idea of manners. 

The idea that manners are merely the accomplish- 
ment of a class, or an indication of one's place in the 
social hierarchy, or something that has to do with 
etiquette and ceremonial — this perversion of truth has 
not, perhaps, as numerous a constituency as its fellow 
falsehood, that money is a key to happiness. But 
that a woman so good and so clever as Lady Frances 
Balfour should say a word tending to propagate this 
destructive falsehood reveals to all who care for Eng- 
land, and who believe that the tone of English life is 
infinitely more important than parliamentary enact- 
ments, in how perilous a position we have come to 
stand. 

We are talking nonsense on the edge of an abyss. 



MANNERS 117 

If you would see the truth of this matter, study 
the Founder of Christianity, whose manners permeated 
if they did not create English character. 

Morals, with Christ, had to do with man as he was; 
Manners with what He was becoming. His blessing 
was on the springs of behaviour — on meekness and 
gentleness, on humility and lowliness, on hunger and 
thirst after perfection, on mercy, purity of heart, 
and long suffering. 

When He stooped and wrote in the dust, He was 
overcome, not by the sin of the captured woman, but 
by the morality of her accusers, a morality so earnest 
and triumphant that it took no count of the sinner's 
feelings, was unconscious even of wounding her sense of 
delicacy. 

His manner to those who were guilty of a licence 
in morals was invariably gentle and tender; on the other 
hand, the mere sight of a Pharisee moved Him to an 
indignation which sometimes disturbed the central 
serenity of His nature. 

His teaching took the Ten Commandments for 
granted. His text began with manners and proceeded 
to perfection. 

St. Paul summed up this teaching in a hymn of 
such exquisite beauty that no words of Shakespeare 
so haunt the human mind: "Though I speak with 
the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, 
I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." 



u8 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

What has the universe got to do with sounding brass 
and a tinkling cymbal? He might perform every 
requirement of the law, even to the extreme of giving all 
his goods to the poor and his body to be burned, and yet 
be worth nothing. 

If ever any instruction was plain and simple, it is this 
instruction of Christ that spiritual evolution, spiritual 
growth, turns on an attitude, a behaviour, a manner, a 
way of handling life, of regarding the universe. 

This was His revelation. Morality can destroy a soul 
quite as easily as immorality. Indeed, the destruction 
of morality is greater, for it hardens the heart ; that is to 
say, hardens the point of contact with God. But with 
love in the heart, the soul even of a great sinner is not 
lost to the purposes of creation. It is certain that the 
angels would prefer to see the earth inhabited by a 
single human being after the pattern of David or 
Augustine than crowded in every continent with 
Pharisees. 

Mrs. Asquith drew up a summary of her history 
and her aspirations. The last of those aspirations 
was for "a crowded memorial service." Will Lady 
Frances Balfour defend the vulgarity of soul which 
inspired that aspiration? Is there not in this passion 
for a last crowd, as it were a last audience, something 
that shocks us in the depths of our nature more than 
the sins of the weak and the uneducated? 

Much is to be learned from that flippancy. Does 



MANNERS 119 

it not witness to an immense desolation of the woman's 
heart ? She does not dare to be alone with herself even 
in the grave. She would have the fashionable world, 
and the photographers of the illustrated papers, as near 
her coffin as burial will permit. As the tree falls, so 
would it lie. As she has sown, so would she reap. 
What vulgarity ! 

I think the decline in manners is to be atrributed 
to a single cause — the loss in man of a sense of dignity. 
He has dislocated his spirit. It is no longer articulated 
with the universe. He thinks of himself as an animal, 
and of the earth as something unrelated to the rest of 
creation. Myopia has seen infinity and formulated a 
thesis of existence. We are outside the invisible; we 
have no connection with eternity; our terrestrial past is 
minus a meaning ; the future of humanity is without a 
goal. 

There was once on this earth a period known as the 
Drift Age. At the present moment we are witnessing a 
Drift Age in morals. Why should man be particular 
about learning his alphabet if the end is only to spell 
with those difficult letters the word Nothing? 

Many people have a fear of Bolshevism. A more 
likely danger to overtake the human race is destruction 
by Pessimism. Moral languor means something more 
than a reversion to animalism ; it means a descent into 
devilry. 

In the sphere of manners I am convinced that the 



120 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

example of Fashion makes powerfully for this danger of 
Pessimism. 

Look at Fashion as it exhibits itself to mankind 
after a calamity unparalleled in history, and ask if 
its example in manners lends any encouragement 
to the passion of the man of science for knowledge, 
to the desire of the world for peace, to the belief of the 
spiritual that life is an everlasting evolution of beauty, 
power, and knowledge? 

What end does Fashion offer to mankind for their 
labours? Its voice is lifted up to say, "Work hard 
if you would have a good time," and its good time 
is a condition of luxury. At the door of Fashion 
the sentinel does not challenge those who approach 
with the cry, ' ' Who goes there ? ' ' but ' ' How much do you 
bring? " So long as a man has made money, no matter 
in what way, and no matter how dull or how stupid 
or how flagrantly vulgar he may be, Fashion will open 
its door to him, and he is admitted to the Olympus of 
our national life. There are men on that Olympus at 
the present moment, boasting of their aristocratic 
friends, whose minds are as truly ignorant of culture as 
the mind of a Patagonian or an Esquimaux. 

In The Young Visiters, at which the world has laughed 
with a rare delight, but which contains matter that 
might almost be said to be written for our learning, 
there is a conversation between Mr. Salteena and the 
Earl of Clincham in the Compartments of the Crystal 



MANNERS 121 

Palace which I think is perfectly characteristic of 
modern society. 

Mr. Salteena desires to enter fashionable circles 
and presents himself before Lord Clincham, who in- 
quires his name. We read : 

Mr. Salteena seated himself gingerly on the edge of a 
crested chair. To tell you the truth my Lord I am not 
anyone of import and I am not a gentleman as they say, 
he ended getting very red and hot. 

Have some whiskey said lord Clincham and he poured 
the liquid into a glass at his elbow. Mr. Salteena lapped 
it up thankfully. 

. . . The Earl gave a slight cough and gazed at Mr. 
Salteena thourghtfully. 

Have you much money he asked and are you prepared 
to spend a good deal. 

Oh yes quite gasped Mr. Salteena. 

We smile ; but the pantomime is true to life. Is there 
a living soul who doubts for a moment that aristocracy 
has sold the pass to Dives? Is there, on the visible 
summit of our national life, we may fairly ask, even one 
true lineal descendant of that aristocracy in the six- 
teenth century which led the Renaissance? We can- 
not pretend that we have a working aristocracy — an 
aristocracy, I mean, whose example penetrates and 
interpenetrates the social organism. It would be 
f oolish to make that pretence. We possess in place of an 
aristocracy of culture a powerful and cynical plutocracy 
which is as wholly given to the worship of Mam- 



122 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

mon as any nation of. heathen times. It is this pluto- 
cracy which influences the whole social organism. At 
the head of the nation are the Mammonites. Fashion 
may amuse itself with the mime and the artist, but 
its only heirs are the sons of Dives. No one, indeed, 
can live in that world who is not rich. He may be 
utterly ignorant, without grace, without value of any 
kind for the higher life of humanity ; but so long as he is 
not poor, he marches at the head of the English nation. 

This condition of modern society has a twofold effect 
on the nation. On the great bulk of the English people 
it has a vulgarising effect — it makes them think highly 
of money and scornfully of culture, it makes them hot 
for self-indulgence and cold towards self -development, 
it makes them eager for parade, display, ostentation; 
they have no inward life, they are "nowhere greater 
strangers than at home," their eyes are in the ends of 
the earth. 

The other effect is on the wage-earner, whose rise 
in wages is at almost every point defeated by the cost 
of living ; on him the display of the ostentatious rich has 
an exasperating effect. At first he strives, like so many 
of those above him, to imitate Fashion, but fails, be- 
comes reckless, and takes to preaching a gospel of plun- 
der and destruction. 

Now, obviously, the one valid justification for an 
aristocracy is that it should lead the nation in the right 
way. It is of value to a state only when it uses its enor- 



MANNERS 123 

mous advantages to discourage what is vain or unprofit- 
able in the social life of the nation, and to encourage 
all that makes for lasting joy and the deepest satisfaction 
of the human spirit. 

Above everything else, it is the duty of an upper 
class to set the highest example in manners. We 
should be able to take the morals of an aristocracy 
for granted. What we chiefly require of it is leadership 
in manners — that is to say, in an attitude towards the 
universe, a handling of life. If it teaches us that luxury 
and ostentation are the chief goods of life, and that 
the wise man is he who possesses himself of the means 
for purchasing those goods, then clearly the Bolshevist 
has as great encouragement for his thesis as the sweater 
of labour, the swindler, the card-sharper, and the 
burglar have for their methods. The whole struggle of 
the nation must inevitably be towards the trough. 

Fashion is so placed that it must set either a good 
or a bad example to the nation. It cannot move with- 
out affecting the whole structure of society. Human- 
ity looks up to Fashion, and is either deceived by it or 
disgusted. Therefore, as I would persuade the central 
classes of the nation to see, it is a matter vital to the 
well-being of the community that Fashion should set 
examples which strengthen the nation and inspire it to 
noble living. 

I would lay emphasis on the disastrous consequences 
of ostentation. I believe that nothing makes the work 



124 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

of the revolutionist easier than the ostentatious luxury 
of the rich. Its social consequence is bad enough, for it 
is vulgarising the middle classes in battalions; but its 
political consequence may well be worse than anything 
we have yet known in our history. Ostentation of the 
kind which is now rampant in the public circles of 
Fashion maddens the atheistical brain of the man who 
has, with a talent for declamation, a struggle to exist. 

If there is one great and controlling principle in the 
behaviour of the average good Englishman it is the 
principle of reserve. 

This virtue is not always the higher virtue of mod- 
esty, but it makes for that virtue. The characteristic 
Englishman does not advertise either his position or his 
possessions. He calls it very bad manners to dress 
loudly, to talk at the top of the voice, to make a dis- 
play of jewellery, to conduct a household ostentatious- 
ly, to be pushful, noisy, extravagant, showy, and brazen ; 
these things he regards as "bad form." They have no 
temptations for him. They are distasteful. 

But among the rich on the summit of our national 
life this principle of behaviour, which I reckon to be the 
historic centre of English character, has no existence. 

These vulgar people have used money to advertise 
their wares, and now would use the money made by that 
advertisement to advertise themselves. The shop 
window is transferred from commercial to social life. 
Reserve in business would be ruin ; reserve in social life 



MANNERS 125 

would be suicide. As they attracted the public to buy 
their goods, so they would attract aristocracy to a 
knowledge of their arrival in Vanity Fair. They 
advertise their existence by hanging their women with 
jewels, by building palatial houses, and by giving enter- 
tainments which in every detail flash wealth in the eyes 
of their parasitic guests. 

"Me's here ! " is the announcement of Midas, striding 
into the Olympus of English life, and Fashion hurries 
forward to offer a "crested chair." 

Ostentation, this disease which threatens our de- 
struction, is not a crime which brings the policeman after 
those who spread its contagion ; it is not nearly so great a 
thing in the eyes of the moralist as the liquor question 
or the question of harlotry; it is in truth a breach of 
manners, a mere vanity against which the Almighty set 
no canon in the thunders of Sinai, a thing to be expected, 
a matter for the gentle ridicule of Punch, an affair be- 
neath the notice of Parliament and Church. 

Nevertheless it is a bad example — an example not of 
low morals, but of bad manners, and an example which 
many will follow who would resist an example in bad 
morals ; so it comes about that we are moving in mass 
on a road so wholly opposite to the road marked out for 
our advance that we cannot hope, if we persist in follow- 
ing it, to escape the wilderness. 

It is curious how the true nature of fine manners 
can escape the attention of even very intelligent people. 



126 THE GLASS OP FASHION 

I find this passage concerning the eighties in that very 
interesting and ably- written book The Reminiscences of 
Lady Randolph Churchill: 

Etiquette and the amenities of social life were thought 
much more of then than now. The writing of ceremon- 
ious notes, the leaving of cards, not to speak of visiles de 
digestion, which even young men were supposed to pay, 
took up most afternoons. There was little or none of 
that extraordinary restlessness and craving for something 
new which is a feature of to-day, necessarily causing man- 
ners to deteriorate, and certainly curtailing the amenities 
of social life on which past generations set such store. A 
nod replaces the ceremonious bow, a familiar handshake 
the elaborate curtsey. The carefully worded, beauti- 
fully written invitation of thirty years ago is dropped 
in favour of a garbled telephone message such as "Will 
Mrs. S. dine with Lady T., and bring a man; and if 
she can't find one she mustn't come, as it would make 
them thirteen"; or a message to a club: "Will Mr. G. 
dine with Lady T. to-night? If so, will he look in the 
card-room and see if any of her lot are there, and suggest 
somebody." Life, however, seemed to be as full then as 
it is now, although people did not try to press into one day 
the duties and pleasures of a week, finishing none and 
enjoying none. The motor and the telephone were un- 
known, and the receipt of the shilling telegram was still 
unusual enough to cause feelings of apprehension. There 
was none of that easy tolerance and familiarity which is 
undoubtedly fostered by the daily, not to say hourly, 
touch and communication of modern society. 

The idea in the writer's mind seems to be that man- 
ners are merely a sort of social polish, a grace of the body 



MANNERS 127 

as it were, like a distinguished diction or a pleasantness 
in conversation. But manners, rightly regarded, are the 
style of the soul, and they can never be genuine, never be 
anything more than veneer or polish, unless they pro- 
ceed as naturally as the exhalation of a rose from the 
inmost beauty of the spirit, that is to say, from humility, 
tenderness, loving-kindness, and desire of excellence. 

The reader of The Mirrors of Downing Street may 
remember that I ventured to criticise Mr. Arthur Bal- 
four, passing behind the shield of his engaging and 
attractive manners to the central egoism of his char- 
acter. I was vehemently attacked for this criticism, 
one of my critics citing as a witness against me Mr. E. 
T. Raymond, who had just then published a biography 
of Mr. Balfour. 

Apparently the only criticism to be gathered from 
that volume, in the opinion of this vehement gentleman, 
is that "Mr. Balfour fails in energy." As for mean- 
ness, "there is not a trace of meanness in Mr. Balfour's 
nature, though there may be a touch of callousness." 

It is difficult to believe that this declaration was 
delivered after reading a book which contains the story 
of Mr. Balfour's dealings with Mr. Ritchie, Lord George 
Hamilton, and Lord Balfour of Burleigh — that episode 
in which, to get rid of those chafing Free Traders, he hid 
from the knowledge of every member of his Cabinet, 
with the solitary exception of the honest and bewildered 
Duke of Devonshire, whom he desired to keep, the all- 



128 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

important fact that he had Mr. Joseph Chamberlain's 
resignation in his pocket. 

In The Mirrors of Downing Street I did not go so far 
as to tell this story in full; I merely suggested it; but 
here it is, in the volume which my critic uses to vindicate 
Mr. Balfour's character, told as stolidly as any police- 
man could tell in the witness-box the story of a three- 
card trick. 

What else does Mr. Raymond say of Mr. Balfour? 
He tells us that this patriotic statesman, this disinter- 
ested great gentleman, who is so indifferent to place and 
power, ' ' could ill endure the comradeship of equals, ' ' and 
that in forming a Cabinet, a Cabinet to be charged with the 
destinies of the British Empire, he "took care, with re- 
gard to his own appointments, not to encourage men 
who could by any possibility threaten his position." 

He was compared, about the time of Mr. Churchill's 
secession, to a beech-tree: very beautiful, but nothing 
could grow under its shade. 

Mr. Raymond proceeds : 

As the older politicians, the Goschens and Hicks- 
Beaches, dropped out, he filled their places with those 
who, through character, mind, or circumstance, were 
likely to develop no inconvenient individuality. Whether 
it was his brother, or his kinsman, or his friend whom he 
elevated, the understanding was the same; they were to 
be less Ministers of the Crown than retainers of Mr. 
Balfour. 



MANNERS 129 

Here is another paragraph : 

Not for the first time or the last in his life he overdid 
things through simple ignorance of the sensitiveness of 
the populace where it suspects any breach of the English 
tradition of fair play. 

And this : 

Mr. Balfour could trust nobody; it is only fair to add 
that very few trusted him. 

What, then, is the value of Mr. Balfour's manners? 

As for Mr. Raymond, I take the liberty of saying 
he would have arrived at a truer measure of his hero had 
his knees not crooked quite so obviously in approaching 
this "exquisite Aramis of politics." He has written 
an indictment, but with a trembling hand. At the end, 
rather horrified by what he has done, he throws up his 
trembling hands with the exclamation, "What a strange 
and elusive personality!" This is not judgment, it is 
surrender. 

To the true historian no personality is elusive. 
He measures all by the same standard, looking at them, 
not to see what interesting things he can say about these 
candidates for Olympus, but only to take their true and 
absolute measure. He asks of each one of them : ' ' Was 
this man truthful? Was he earnest? Was he unself- 
ish?" And then he looks at the man's work, and 
asks "Did it enrich the poor, comfort the sorrowful, 
strengthen the weak, inspire the strong? Did it bring 



130 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

glory to his nation, and peace to mankind? What did 
it accomplish for the higher life of the human race?" 

Measure Mr. Balfour by the same standards with 
which history has measured Abraham Lincoln, Mazzini, 
and Gladstone, and where is his place among the 
immortals ? 

The more we consider his charm, his powers, and his 
advantages the greater must be our condemnation. 
For every man's achievement should be judged by two 
things — his gifts and his opportunities. 

One of the traits in Mr. Balfour's character to which 
I drew attention in The Mirrors of Downing Street was 
his indifference to his servants. Mr. Raymond makes 
a very interesting reply to this criticism : 

Not knowing how he treats his servants, I have not 
accused him of treating them badly. 

I take it there are only two ways of getting accurate 
knowledge of such a point. One must have been a 
servant of Mr. Balfour, or one must have been on con- 
fidential terms with a servant of Mr. Balfour. Never 
having worn the Whittingeham livery, never having had 
a friend who has worn that livery, his personality in this 
regard has certainly eluded me. But I am not in the least 
ashamed of omitting from an appraisement of Mr. Balfour 
the point of view of the servants' hall. 

It will be observed that Mr. Raymond expresses in 
this passage a contempt for servants. That is import- 
ant. I pass over his obviously vain suggestion that a 
man can tell how his friends and acquaintances treat 



MANNERS 131 

their servants only by becoming one of those servants 
himself. I pass over this in order to lay particular 
stress on the very repellent attitude to domestic 
servants which Mr. Raymond strikes in this passage, 
evidently in the belief that he is thoroughly in the 
fashion, as indeed he is, but without realising that it is a 
thoroughly bad new fashion. x 

For myself, I gratefully acknowledge, I spent the 
most Arcadian part of my boyhood in the company 
of grooms and gamekeepers, that I loved an old country 
nurse far more than my grandmothers and aunts, that 
I paid innumerable visits to the kitchen, every feature 
of which still lives affectionately in my mind, in order to 
get sweet things from a most delightful old cook, and 
also to see a quite elderly laundry woman perform 
the astounding trick of jumping from the seat of a chair 
over its back. Nor did my parents ever forbid my 
brothers and me from accepting invitations to tea in 
her cottage, most kindly offered to us by the coachman's 
wife. In fact, looking back on those early years, I 
seem to remember, much more clearly than the people 
of my own class, the characters and personalities of 
my father's servants and the villagers who surrounded 
us, particularly the poachers, in whose cottages we were 

1 Mr. Wilfred Blunt records a conversation with Mr. Hyndman on 
the subject of Winston Churchill. "They tell me," said Mr. Hynd- 
man, "he is rude and brutal with servants." Mr. Blunt assured him 
that this was not so, "and he was glad to hear it." Both these men are 
gentlemen (My Diaries, Part II., p.306.). 



132 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

always made extremely welcome, no matter what was 
the state of our boots. 

This may seem shocking, or even unbelievable, to 
Mr. Raymond. But I would assure him few things were 
more charmingly characteristic of the old-fashioned 
English home than the affectionate relations which 
existed between the family and its faithful servants. 
The beautiful old Duchess of Abercorn, for example, 
was known to go rat-hunting with a stable boy even 
when she was ninety years of age, and there was not a 
servant in her house with whose family affairs she was 
not perfectly and even affectionately acquainted. Lord 
Lansdowne, as Governor-General of Canada, had one 
of his footmen as a curler in the Rideau Hall team. 
Mr. G. W. E. Russell had no truer friends than his 
butler and his cook, Mr. and Mrs. George Payne, to 
whom he bequeathed almost everything he possessed. 
One of the Wyndham boys is described by Mr. Blunt 
on a visit to Clouds in the following manner: "He is 
very good-looking, and spends most of his time with the 
servants in the pantry and the housekeeper's room, 
where he talks nonsense to the maids, and helps the 
footmen to clean the knives." And of the other 
children at Clouds we read: "They spent the day 
making a grand picnic with the servants and govern- 
esses." Mr. Samuel Butler lavished his affections on 
no one so completely as his servant Alfred, whose place 
in history is more secure than Mr. Raymond's. Per- 



MANNERS 133 

haps Mr. Raymond, who is a journalist, will be more 
astonished by the following incident. I remember 
speaking to Lord Northcliffe on one occasion of a 
very intelligent footman who acted as my valet at 
Sutton Place. Lord Northclifle, who is entirely free 
from all snobbishness, replied with enthusiasm: "I'm 
so glad you've talked to him. He's a very clever young 
fellow. I'm helping him in his education. I rather 
think he will do something in the world." 

This matter of the treatment of servants is worthy 
of mention, because one of the worst characteristics of 
modern manners is a spirit of selfishness, conceit, and 
snobbishness which more and more tends to separate 
the various classes of the community. It is a spirit 
which entirely destroys the idea of the human family. 
We are ceasing to think of others. 

Lord Frederic Hamilton has noticed this change in 
The Days Before Yesterday: 1 

Neither my father nor my mother ever dined out on 
Sunday, nor did they invite people to dinner on that day, 
for they wished to give those in their employment a day 
of rest. All quite hopelessly Victorian ! for, after all, why 
should people ever think of anybody but themselves ? 

Present-day hostesses tell me that all young men, and 
most girls, are kind enough to flick cigarette ash all over 
their drawing-rooms, and considerately throw lighted 
cigarette-ends on the fine old Persian carpets, and burn 
holes in pieces of valuable old French furniture. Of 

1 The Days Before Yesterday, by Lord Frederic Hamilton. 



134 THE GLASS OP FASHION 

course it would be too much trouble to fetch an ash-tray, 
or to rise to throw lighted cigarette-ends into the grate. 
The young generation have never been brought up to 
take trouble, nor to consider other people. 

There you have the root cause of all bad manners, 
whatever form they take — selfishness. And selfishness, 
what is it, if we examine it with attention, but a deep 
and most disfiguring spiritual defect ? 

As soon as we realise this truth, we perceive at once 
that manners — the word Hobbes employed for morals 
— are something much more important to the social and 
political life of a great nation than the physical graces 
offered to mankind at the hands of a professor in deport- 
ment. They are the style of a nation — the mark it is 
making on the civilised progress of mankind. 

But instead of a beautiful and noble life, a life leading 
upward from one spiritual desire to another, upward 
and onward to Dante's indistinctly apprehended bliss 
on which the soul may rest, instead of this we have at 
present the life of the jazz, the life of the Victory 
Dance. Mr. Noyes has described this new form of the 
social rout, this new spirit of the national life, in memor- 
able verses, of which I am permitted by his publishers, 
Messrs. Cassell, to print one : 

The cymbals crash, 

And the dancers walk, 
With long silk stockings 

And arms of chalk, 



MANNERS 135 

Butterfly skirts, 

And white breasts bare, 
And shadows of dead men 

Watching 'em there. 

Sir Ian Hamilton, heartbroken by the Peace of 
Versailles, has published in the John Keats Memorial 
Volume an even more scornful indictment. He speaks 
of the angel who led our boyhood to the sacrifice of their 
lives, an angel of spiritual exaltation, and then of 
Versailles, where "the diplomats danced with their 
typists." His soul rebels against this anti-climax. 
The banners of self-sacrifice have been dragged through 
the dirt. The names of the valiant dead are writ in 
water. 

"Who has quenched that new star of Bethlehem 
which still throughout the War went before the fighters 
giving them some respite from their pain? Why is it 
that peace has suddenly made the vaulted heavens 
as black as the socket from which some fiend has torn 
the eye?" 

Ah, in everything we have lost the secret. We 
think not of others, but of ourselves. 

"It is, of course," says Lord Frederic Hamilton, 
"the easy fashion now to sneer at Victorian standards. 
To my mind they embody all that is clean and sound in 
the nation. It does not follow that because Victorians 
revelled in hideous wallpapers and loved ugly furniture, 
that therefore their points-of-view were mistaken ones. 



136 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

There are things more important than wallpapers. 
They certainly liked the obvious in painting, in music, 
and perhaps in literature, but it hardly seems to follow 
logically from that that their conceptions of a man's 
duty to his wife, family, and country were necessarily 
false ones. They were not afflicted with the perpetual 
modern restlessness, nor did they spend 'their time in 
nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear, some new 
thing' ; still, all their ideas seem to me eminently sweet 
and wholesome. ' ' 



CHAPTER IX 

EXAMPLES IN LOVE 

It is the unconscious, rather than the conscious, which is 
the important factor in personality and intelligence. The 
unconscious furnishes the formative material out of which 
our judgments, our beliefs, our ideals, and our characters are 
shaped. — Morton Prince. 

Before marriage this question should be put: Will you 
continue to be satisfied with this woman's conversation until old 
age ? Everything else in marriage is transitory. — Nietzsche. 

When we consider that a son born into a family of 
ancient lineage and of inspiring traditions, surrounded 
from infancy by objects of the greatest beauty, accus- 
tomed from childhood to the intimate friendship of the 
great, sent for his education to a school like Eton, and a 
university like Oxford, when we consider that a child so 
caressed by fortune and so nurtured by privilege does 
very often, as the first free act of his manhood, marry 
someone quite unsuitable to his place in the social 
hierarchy, such as a chorus girl out of a comic opera, we 
have reason to conclude that something was want- 
ing in his circumstances, or his upbringing, which was 
essential to wisdom and happiness. 

137 



138 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

It is now a commonplace of political reform that 
education is a chief safeguard of the state. Our politi- 
cians tell us that when the democracy is well housed 
and thoroughly educated, all those economic problems 
which darken the future of civilisation will rise like mists 
and leave humanity in the full sunlight of millennium. 

But democracy can never be better housed than 
Fashion, and never more carefully educated than 
the sons of Fashion. If, then, with all the blessings 
of beautiful houses and a system of education conse- 
crated by centuries of piety, the sons of Fashion com- 
mit the greatest of follies at the outset of their career, 
and afterwards often live in a contemptible manner, 
spending their mature manhood, these sons of aris- 
tocracy, merely as spectators of the national life — the 
destinies of which are so largely in the hands of self- 
educated men from the lower ranks of society — how 
shall we look for salvation to the schoolmaster and the 
architect ? 

Something else, manifestly, is essential to safety. 

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that great 
numbers of young men in fashionable society pick up 
their wives just as a sensualist picks up a woman in 
the street. They are attracted by artifices which the 
prostitute has brought to perfection by long practice; 
they are knocked over by a calculated audacity, an 
unblushing but frequently an affected animalism, a 
licentiousness which is often as much put on as the 



EXAMPLES IN LOVE 139 

complexion or the eyebrows; they lose their heads 
to the heel of a shoe and their hearts to the suffocation 
of a scent — these young men who have been brought 
up with every advantage of environment, education, 
and tradition. 

The chorus girl whom they find so seductive at a 
table in a restaurant, so intoxicating in the padded re- 
cesses of a motor-car, is a person of no education and of 
few morals ; she would not for the world walk the pave- 
ments at night, but she would not scruple to sell herself 
into a union, legal or illegal, with a rich man for whom 
she entertains no deep affection. She belongs, as a rule, 
to the lower middle classes, and has spent her childhood 
in the suburbs. Her solitary cleverness is a faculty for 
imitation; she can affect a drawl of boredom, has all 
the phrases of smart society on the tip of her tongue, 
and can powder her chin in public with the very gesture 
of a duke's daughter. Fundamentally she is as igno- 
rant as a Red Indian. 

That a young Englishman of the highest class in 
the land, with all the brilliant and beautiful women of 
the world to choose from, should select such a trivial 
little baggage as this for the mate of his soul and the 
companion of his life, is not a matter for amusement or 
amazement, but a fact of great social importance. 

It brings us, I think, face to face with an evil which is 
corrupting the whole body of civilisation like a cancer — 
an arrest of moral growth, a refusal of vital tissues to 



140 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

follow the law of their being, a stoppage in the develop- 
ment of the human soul. 

Coleridge saw this danger long ago, and realised 
its infinite importance : 

All the evil achieved by Hobbes, and the whole School 
of Materialists, will appear inconsiderable if it be com- 
pared with the mischief effected and occasioned by the 
sentimental philosophy of Sterne, and his numerous 
imitators. 

The vilest appetites and the most remorseless incon- 
stancy towards their objects, acquired the titles of the 
Heart, the irresistible Feelings, the too tender Sensibility; 
and if the frosts of prudence, the icy chains of human law, 
thawed and vanished at the genial warmth of Human 
Nature, who could help it ? It was an amiable weakness ! 

About this time, too, the profanation of the word 
Love rose to its height. 

The French naturalists, Buffon and others, borrowed it 
from the sertimental novelists; the Swedish and English 
philosophers took the contagion ; and the Muse of Science 
condescended to seek admission into the salons of Fashion 
and Frivolity, rouged like a harlot, and with the harlot's 
wanton leer. 

He goes on to say, in words which after a hundred 
years are still applicable to the condition of human 
society : 

I know not how the annals of guilt could be better 
forced into the service of virtue than by such a comment 
on the present paragraph as would be afforded by a 
selection from the sentimental correspondence produced 
in courts of justice within the last thirty years, fairly 



EXAMPLES IN LOVE 141 

translated into the true meaning of the words and the 
natural object and purpose of the infamous writers. 



The sentimental correspondence produced in the 
divorce court of our own days seems to me a document 
of the gravest sociological importance. No one can 
read the tragic or stupid effusions of respondents and 
co-respondents without an immense wonder at the 
ignorance of the human race, and a profound com- 
passion for its victims. Those letters, if we read them 
with the sympathy they deserve, remembering, in spite 
of their construction and grammar, their crudeness and 
naivete, their vulgarity and slang, that they are written 
by actual men and women, men and women anxious for 
happiness and capable of suffering, men and women, 
too, whose right-thinking is of importance to the 
rest of us, those letters, I think, witness to a colossal 
blunder on the part of society. 

After all, the young man of Fashion and the powdered 
girl from the chorus are only children. They are at the 
door of experience, on the threshold of freedom, when 
they make their disastrous mistake. If the youth is 
persuaded that he can be permanently happy in the 
society of a girl no better educated, no sweeter-minded, 
no purer and holier in the true sense of these words, than 
the strumpets of Coventry Street; and if, on her part, 
the girl is convinced that the summum bonum is wealth, 
that possessions are the end of existence, that a title or 



142 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

a fortune solves all the difficulties of life ; if this be so, then 
the fault is not in themselves that they are such moral 
and intellectual underlings, but in the state of society. 

When I consider society's preparation for marriage, 
and its whole attitude towards love, I regard the divorce 
court not only as an inevitable institution of civilisation, 
but as one of the most merciful of our humanitarian and 
philanthropic organisations — indeed the kindest of all 
rescue societies. Like Coleridge, I regard marriage by 
the Registrar as "reverential to Christianity"; for it 
seems to me the very height of blasphemy that people 
who marry without the noblest conception of love in 
their souls should approach the altar of God and there 
make vows which only the sweetest purity can conse- 
crate and only the most religious virtue can hope to 
keep. Far better that the fashionable marriage of our 
times should have no more religious pretensions than 
the hiring of a piano or the engaging of a bedroom, and 
that as soon as the unhappy couple have come to their 
senses, and realise that to live together in daily com- 
munion of mind and soul is an intolerable torture, they 
should be set free to make, if not a wiser choice, at least 
another shot. 

No society with such a spirit as ours has the smallest 
right to condemn divorce. Its children not only have 
an absolute title to divorce, but just cause to bring 
against society, out of their own miseries, an indictment 
charging it with the crimes of the pimp and the pander. 



EXAMPLES IN LOVE 143 

Divorce can be regarded only as reprehensible in a 
society which makes the elevation of love a chief object 
of education, and itself sets the noblest examples in this 
highest of all human relationships. The children of 
devoted parents, parents who sacrificed everything to 
the highest spiritual interests of their children, are alone 
without excuse in that court of mercy. 

No one will claim that Fashion labours in this 
direction; but how many perceive that the whole 
tendency of Fashion in this matter is towards the 
degradation of love? Almost every influence it pos- 
sesses, so far as I am able to judge, is brought to bear 
on love with the sole purpose of degrading what the 
sentimentalist only profaned. 

I am not speaking of a direct didactic addressed by 
society to the consciousness of mankind. I am speak- 
ing of Atmosphere — that power which penetrates to the 
huge workshop of the mind which we now call the 
unconscious. The atmosphere of our day, lacking the 
vigour of a moral purpose, has the exhausting and 
atrophying closeness of a hothouse. It is created by 
loose thinking. It fills the air with multiplying fallacies. 
It preys upon the unconscious mind with a thousand 
suggestions, making for self-indulgence. It undoes 
without effort all the painful work of the schoolmaster. 
It wipes the slate clean of religion. It is an atmosphere 
inimical to moral health and absolutely destructive of 
spiritual aspiration. 



144 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

We must be honest with ourselves and confront 
the truth of our times. The profanation of love by the 
sentimentalist has ceased. The language of Sterne, 
which moved Coleridge to indignation, moves Fashion 
only to laughter; all that antique talk of sensibility 
is held in derision, as out of date now as the fainting 
heroines of Thackeray and Dickens. Society to-day 
is more honest, more brutal. It has ceased to make 
any pretence to idealism. Adultery has discarded the 
romantic cloak of Romeo, and comes laughing to the 
assignation in the modernised undress of Don Juan. 
The whole atmosphere is changed. It is more 
honest. It is more loyal to the lower nature. Love 
is a joke, one of the amusements, one of the ad- 
ventures, one of the sports, one of the recreations 
of society. To take it seriously is both provincial 
and dangerous. It must be treated as our fathers 
treated flirtation. The business of life is money; 
one of its recreations, like bridge or golf, is the sex- 
ual instinct. The romantic woman learns at her first 
fence that she must choose between hysterics and 
"lovers." 

This atmosphere, which is now almost universal 
throughout society, I regard as fatal to the higher 
life of the human race. It makes passion one of the 
indecencies of life — a subject for grins and whispers, 
a theme for revue, an opportunity for gossip, a matter 
on all fours with a dirty story. It is a destructive 




Keystone View Co. 



COLONEL CHARLES REPINGTON 



EXAMPLES IN LOVE 145 

atmosphere. It kills love as readily as an abortionist 
kills a future human being. 

Perhaps the reader will pardon me if I venture to 
suggest to Fashion a moment's consideration of the 
pedigree of love. I should not dream of making this 
suggestion in an essay of the present character were 
I not convinced that even among educated people 
slovenliness of thought may lead to calamitous conse- 
quences; as witness in the last fifty years the philo- 
sophical havoc wrought among educated people by so 
foolish a phrase as the struggle for existence, few men 
perceiving that a creature in existence cannot possibly 
struggle for what it already possesses, and that the 
real struggle in nature — a key to the spiritual mys- 
tery — is a struggle for improvement, and that the 
greatest force in that struggle is not egotism, self- 
ishness, and brutal aggression, but a most significant 
co-operation. 

Let Fashion ask itself how it comes to exist. Let 
it look at the stage on which the human comedy is 
enacted. That stage has a history; all the players 
have a pedigree; history and pedigree alike stretch 
back into an utterly immeasurable past. Life, what- 
ever we choose to make it, can only be treated lightly or 
derisively by a lunatic. It is far too old a thing, too 
wonderful an antiquity, to be treated like one of the 
crazes of the last season. It is worthy of interest, 
worthy, perhaps, of reverence and gratitude. Only in 



146 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

the delusions of an idiot can it be divorced from its 
context of the eternal existence. 

There was once no universe. The horizons of space 
stretched onwards into a distance which had neither 
boundary wall nor ultimate sheer precipice descending 
with a rush into the void of nothingness. 

There was no time. Duration was a dial with neither 
figures nor hands. 

There was no life. The conjugation of existence 
rested at the First Person of the Present Tense: I AM. 

Out of this just comprehensible abidance of the 
Infinite within the Infinite came the birth of life. 

There was movement. In this movement there was 
direction. The universe was born. 

Of that stupendous creation three things may be 
affirmed at this day with some confidence: it is the 
work of Mind, it is altogether too huge for an idle fancy, 
and love, if not its sole object, is at least one of its 
preponderant forces. 

So far as our planet is concerned we can imagine 
its history without many of the means which appear to 
have moulded its destinies, but it is beyond the reach of 
imagination to think of that eventful chronicle without 
the love which exists in the tigress for its cubs, the wren 
for its nestlings, and the mother for her children. 

Love, then, is a great thing. Even as lust it is a great 
thing. For, steadily regarded, lust is seen as the 
manger used by evolution for the first cradle of self- 



EXAMPLES IN LOVE 147 

sacrifice. Out of lust, blind animal lust, which is a 
clean thing, and not a prurient thing like a Kirchner 
picture, has come the highest love we know, the love 
which takes no thought for itself. 

If you regard the common love of man and woman 
just as it is, remembering its history, and seeing what it 
can achieve, you will find that it is not to be placed 
where Fashion loves to place it, among the indecencies 
of civilisation. It is a tremendous thing in a tremend- 
ous universe, born of the first movement of Antecedent 
Existence, and bearing in its seed the highest purposes 
of the creative power; something to be exalted, rever- 
enced, perfected; something that seems as though it had 
the power, as nothing else on earth, to make gods of us, 
when the end is reached ; something which only a devil 
could profane, and in which only a fool could see nothing 
for marvel and thanksgiving. 

Such is the love which brings a grin to painted lips 
and amusement to "clinkered souls." 

Fashion, I hope, will observe that in this brief sum- 
mary of evolution I have made no appeal to religion, 
and advanced no claim for love which is not justified 
by the findings of physical science. I am anxious to 
persuade people on the grounds of reason alone that love 
is a respectable thing. It has a pedigree whose origin 
is lost to us only in the origin of the Absolute. It has 
a history which is as sublime as the history of the visible 
universe. And at every point in that mysterious 



H8 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

struggle for perfection which we call evolution it is 
found working for the destiny towards which all crea- 
tion is moving, and of which no man has been able to 
imagine the end. 

To degrade love, then, to make it something base or 
trivial, is to interfere with the first mechanism of evolu- 
tion. And to do this is as much to endanger the safety 
of the human race as squirting corrosive acid into the 
eye would endanger sight. Fashion, when it plays with 
love, is indeed playing with a fire that may consume 
the house of life. For love is essential to existence ; and 
the evolution of love is essential to higher existence. If 
we use this tremendous power loosely we hinder its 
purpose ; if we use it vilely we bring creation to a stand- 
still. For we transitory creatures in an endless chain of 
existence, receiving from the past and giving to the 
future, we are the reeds through which this power would 
blow the hymn of creation, the laudamus of the universe, 
the lyric of the human heart ; and if we behave as if for 
us and for us alone — for our vulgarities, vanities, inde- 
cencies, and egoisms — everything that exists has been 
created, we silence the music of God, and in ourselves at 
least bring the divine purpose to a standstill. 

Domestic unhappiness is a consequence of wrong 
thinking in society. Wrong-thinking is fatal to right- 
living. The atmosphere is charged with illusion, and 
illusion is the fertile parent of disaster. However 
beautifully a child may be surrounded in his nonage, 



EXAMPLES IN LOVE 149 

and however carefully he may be educated in his youth, 
he comes at manhood into a world which is apparently 
organised solely for the many purposes of self-indul- 
gence, and which is certainly not organised for any far- 
off divine event, a world whose whole thesis of life is 
vitiated by a false premise. 

In this world, blinded by its artificial brilliance 
and bewildered by its rush towards excitement and sen- 
sation, in this world, where there is no shrine for wor- 
ship and no altar for silence and reflection, in this cyni- 
cal and disillusioned world, where to be serious is to be 
deserted as a bore, and to be virtuous is to be ridiculed 
as a prig, the youth makes his choice of a wife, and the 
girl makes her choice of a husband. 

They are brought together by festivity. Their 
personalities touch in a racket. Their first embrace, 
to the music of a negro band, is made in a dance 
from the jungle. Nothing in the atmosphere suggests 
seriousness. No one utters a warning, no one breathes 
a caution. On the contrary, to think is to find oneself 
stranded. Flung into the rush and deafened by the 
noise, the one thing to do is to keep one's feet ; to keep 
one's head — -that is impossible, and useless. 

Everything declares that life is a masquerade, and 
self-indulgence the sole purpose of creation. The 
daughter learns from her mother, the son from his 
father. Everyone is selfish. There is only one reason- 
able pursuit — a good time. And this is the good time ; 



150 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

this life of pleasure, this life of eating and drinking, of 
dancing and flirting, of crowds and crushes, of adven- 
tures in sex, of licence and cynicism, of excitement and 
selfishness, of money and ostentation. "Is he rich? 
Then, my dear, why hesitate? Marry him at once." 

It is in such an atmosphere as this that the marriages 
of Fashion are made. Youth enters by the gate of 
comedy and goes out through the door of tragedy. 
The embrace of the jazz is dissolved by the decree abso- 
lute of the divorce court. 

This is the example set by Fashion in a matter which 
is foundational to the safety and happiness of the State. 

Civilisations, let us assure ourselves, are far more 
vulnerable on their domestic side than on their economic 
side. The home is the unit of the nation. Family life 
is its great assurance. If a state would not perish it 
must see that its homes are the altars of human happi- 
ness, must realise that its economic activity has for its 
main object the human happiness of the family. A bad 
example in this matter is a thousand times more perilous 
than any propaganda of Bolshevism. No gospel of 
anarchy, indeed, could exist for nine days in a state 
founded on the sure satisfaction of family life. It is 
only by the door of domestic unhappiness that political 
unrest enters a community. 

There was a time, as Sainte-Beuve says, when the 
follies and sins of Fashion were prevented, by the ex- 
clusiveness of society itself, from penetrating to the 



EXAMPLES IN LOVE 151 

bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But since the day of 
Sainte-Beuve few things done by Fashion lack the ser- 
vice of a publicity agent. Indeed, Fashion itself tells 
the story; Fashion itself gives its photograph to the 
world. There is no shame. There is no desire even for 
the humility of anonymity. Fashion, flattered and 
amused by the invitation of the other classes, is now 
as ready to bare its bosom to the lending library as to 
give a testimonial to a wig-maker or maker of com- 
plexions. The cry of the very lowest stratum is now 
the cry for "a good time." 

The blunder of Fashion is caused by forgetfulness. 
It has forgotten the past of humanity, and it forgets 
that humanity has a future. It occupies its place in 
time without gratitude and without any feeling of 
responsibility. The past is a blank, the future a void. 
The long ancestry of mankind is no more to it than aback 
number of Punch; the future destinies of the human 
race no more to it than the weather of the next century. 

It is just for want of this sense of proportion that 
Fashion has lost the capacity for seriousness. It sees 
the cosmos in a ballroom, and the human race in its own 
mirror. It is an inch thinking of itself as the whole 
mile, a wave thinking of itself as all the ocean, a syllable 
in Hamlet thinking of itself as the soul of Shakespeare. 

It sees creation so completely out of perspective, 
and so totally ignores the whole chronicle of history, 
that it has even lost the sense of a local patriotism. 



152 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

It does not feel itself in any way responsible for the wel- 
fare of England. And so it comes about that Fashion 
recklessly sets examples which are fatal to the stability 
of England's national greatness, examples which menace 
the very foundations of English character, examples of 
which the worst of all is this example in the field of love 
— an example which corrupts human life at its very 
source and reduces the great security of national exist- 
ence to a problem for discussion among novelists. 

When a school of philosophers tells me that many 
mysteries in psychology may be traced back to "sex 
repressions," I wonder if it has never occurred to this 
school that what it regards as a "repression" may in 
truth be an "obsession," and that this sediment of sex 
which it professes to find in so many minds is not the 
consequences of evolution, but the result of mass 
suggestion — symptomatic of an immoral age, but not 
characteristic of mankind in its health and sanity. 

Where love is lacking, "sex" lurks. Love is a 
cleansing power; "sex" is nothing more than lust in a 
state of decomposition. 

Does it not demand a diseased mind to admit the 
contention of Remy de Gourmont that the statuary 
of Greece is immortal because it is sexual, and sexual 
because it is nude ? Is not the ' ' sex ' ' in the mind of de 
Gourmont, and not in the statuary? There are minds 
which are like a printer's error: they can only see 
immorality in immortality. 



CHAPTER X 

WOMANHOOD 

The mother of debauchery is not joy, but joylessness. — 
Nietzsche. 

My mother's character was a blend of extreme simplicity 
and great dignity, with a limitless gift of sympathy for others. 
I can say with perfect truth that, throughout her life, she suc- 
ceeded in winning the deep love of all those who were brought 
into constant contact with her. — Lord Frederic Hamilton. 

One markedly new thing in English life has accom- 
panied the decline in morals and manners. This new- 
thing is a new spirit in women. 

The Times recently reported Mr. Justice Horridge's 
summing up to a jury in these words : 

You have to try to consider the matter of the co-re- 
spondent's conduct from the point of view of society as it 
has existed since the War. You and I may think that the 
good old times, when married women did not knock about 
with men quite so much as they do, and girls did not go 
unchaperoned into ballrooms, were the right times. We 
may think it would be good if those times came back 
again, but you have to consider this case from the point of 
view of what is going on all around us. 

153 



154 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

In these words the judge gave to the dramatis persona 
of our age a new character : The woman who knocks about. 
The expression is a useful one. It points to an absence 
of all direction. The woman who knocks about is not 
walking to the devil with her eyes open. She is not court- 
ing disaster with a guide book to show her the way. She 
is not looking for trouble with a microscope. Her peril 
is absence of motive. She does not know why she is liv- 
ing. She is not at a loose end ; existence itself is a loose 
end. She knocks about, like a cork in the sea. 

The Woman Who Knocks About has superseded the 
Particular Woman. 

All round London there is a vast and spreading circle 
of villadom. A few years ago these suburbs were the 
strongholds of family life. Here lived people who 
mocked the extravagances of fashionable society, and 
were blissfully unaware of its deeper iniquities. The 
husbands went by train to the City; the house-proud 
wives remained at home with the children. The life of 
each little community centred in the home, and had its 
circumference in the parish, of which they were proud 
and in which they worked. You found benevolence 
there, a sense of neighbourly responsibility, a desire for 
mental improvement, above all things, self-sacrifice for 
the sake of the children. 

To-day, many of these women go to London almost 
as regularly as their husbands go to the City. They are 
spoken of as "Season Ticket Women." Their excuse 



WOMANHOOD 155 

is the shop — their attraction is the restaurant. They 
have contracted a passion for crowds, for adventures, 
for excitement. They knock about with other people 
who are knocking about. In a garish restaurant, with 
an orchestra playing dance music, and crowds of people 
waiting for tables, they light their cigarettes, drink 
their liqueurs, and feel that they are at the very centre 
of fashionable life. 

Not many of these women are faithless to their mar- 
riage vows. But they are faithless to their children, 
faithless to their homes, faithless to the Church, faith- 
less to the great moral traditions of their country. A 
few of them take the next step. They conceive a 
passion — perhaps for some boy in the Air Service. 
They pay for his meals, buy him neckties and cigarettes, 
take him to the music-hall. He seems to them much 
more heroic than their hard-working husbands. They 
come to regard duty as dull, and the narrow way as a 
rut. A delightful feeling of romance blinds them to the 
nobler qualities, the enduring virtues, the firmer man- 
hood of their husbands. Any young blackguard in a 
uniform has for these middle-aged imbeciles the linea- 
ments of Romeo and the character of Hector. Self- 
respect is consumed in the transient flame of a romantic 
excitement ; they go to the devil. 

Fashion is fond of laughing at the pretensions of 
the middle class. But those pretensions are merely its 
own spirit on a smaller income. 



156 THE GLASS OP FASHION 

I have visited many hostels occupied by girls of 
education, who are training for professional careers. 
The casualties in this quarter are the casualties of semi- 
starvation. These girls, many of them fresh and grace- 
ful, some of them most beautiful, are hectic, excitable, 
unstable, neurotic. When they are hungry they drink 
tea, when they are racked by nerves they smoke cigar- 
ettes. A slight illness brings them to collapse. Many 
die when they are quite young. 

Who is to blame? 

These girls, fighting for their careers, spend every 
penny they can scrape together on raiment. They 
stand no chance if they are not fashionably dressed. 
Artificial silk means more to them than honest wool. 
The good Englishman in India, denying himself a holi- 
day at home, sending all the money he can save to his 
daughter in England, believing that his self-sacrifice is 
providing for her health and happiness, learns by one 
mail that she has caught a cold and by the next that she 
is dead. 

There is a more sordid aspect of this corruption. 
The vice of our public streets has undergone a remark- 
able change. There is a new race of immoral women. 
They come from offices and shops. They are young, and 
the glamour of the summit has bewitched them. They 
desire the life of fashion, the life of indelicate clothes, 
gilded restaurants, the theatre, and the night-club. 

They are not vicious. They have none of the criminal 



WOMANHOOD 157 

instincts of those women who complain of their competi- 
tion. Ask them what they want, and they will tell you 
"a good time." That is all. They want to see life. 
They have looked up to our highest, and in their own 
small way would copy them. So they sell first their 
modesty and then their virtue. It is the price they pay 
for "a good time." 

We sell our honours for money by the hand of our 
Prime Minister and in the name of our Sovereign. 
These girls give their honour for the same exchange. 
Money can buy anything, even what is called an 
"illegal operation." 

Go lower still. There is a collapse of the most primi- 
tive virtue among girls who live in the slums of our 
seaport towns. They are so shameless that they get 
themselves rowed out to incoming ships that they may 
make sure of a sailor when the vessel comes into port, be 
he Lascar, Negro, or Chinaman. Parliament has just 
lately had to move in this matter, so great, so open, is 
the scandal; it is now enacted that no woman may enter 
a port "for the purpose of prostitution," or be rowed out 
to a ship for that same object. J 

1 (1) A prostitute shall not enter or be on board any ship or vessel in 
any port, dock, or harbour for the purpose of prostitution, and a person 
shall not take any prostitute on board any ship for any such purpose. 

(2) It shall be the duty of every port, deck, and harbour authority 
by the exercise of any powers possessed by them in that behalf, to take 
all reasonable steps to prevent persons from resorting to any port, 
dock, or harbour, of which they are the authority, or any ship or vessel 
therein, for purposes of prostitution. 



158 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

Some of these girls are the very dregs of degradation. 
Most of them, however, are inspired by the same motive 
which moves the millionaire to activity. They want 
money. And they want money for the same reason 
that the millionaire's wife and daughter want it; for 
display, for rich food, for excitement, for "a good time." 
Tell them that it is wrong to be immodest, wicked to be 
immoral, and they will point to the heights, laughing 
you to scorn for a canting, psalm-singing charlatan. 
They have ceased to feel the smallest respect for virtue. 
After all, to the eyes of eternal Judgment, is there 
much difference in moral values between the summit 
and the abyss? 

There comes from social workers in all quarters of our 
congested and violent life a cry that borders on despair. 
The womanhood of the nation is becoming corrupt. 
There is a decided movement among the older women 
towards drunkenness, among the younger women 
towards vice. A lady who has visited the common 
lodging-houses of London says that educated girls of a 
quite decent class are now to be found there among 
the vilest women. Out of twenty-eight inmates in one 
case alone fifteen were found with venereal disease. 

Even where the Commandments are not broken 
the spirit of virtue is ignored. The demand of these 
women is for excitement. They cannot rest. To be 
patient is to be tortured. To be at home is to be 
imprisoned. They clamour to live like the Rich. The 



WOMANHOOD 159 

old ideal of the English mother, finding her heaven in 
her home and her immortality in her children, is no 
longer the fashion. The music of life has become 
livelier, and they would dance. This passion for knock- 
ing about has descended to lower levels. I open my 
newspaper this morning and find the following report of 
"A Girl's Gay Life": 

Describing herself as the private secretary of a financial 
magnate, N. T., the pretty daughter of a Treforest 
(Glamorgan) collier, made her home at the Westgate 
Hotel, Newport (Mon.), from December 22nd to January 
1 st. There she is alleged to have spent much time in the 
lounge, smoking cigarettes and entertaining young men 
to champagne suppers. She left without paying her 
account. 

When charged at Newport yesterday with false pre- 
tences involving nearly £12, with 6s. for cigarettes, the 
Bench were informed that the girl, who was supposed 
by her mother to be employed at an office at Cardiff, had 
for two years been leading a gay life, supported by moneys 
from a source which she would not divulge. 

The girl's father offered to pay the debt, and as the 
prosecution did not press the matter the Bench bound her 
over for six months. 

There is here only one element which makes the 
case notable, and so brings it into the limelight of public 
attention; the girl could not pay her bill. Anyone who 
knows the chief cities of the provinces is familiar with 
the same spirit in thousands of girls. It is universal. 
Let the traveller go into the ' ' lounge of the great hotels 



1 60 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Edin- 
burgh, Glasgow, and he will find those places occupied 
mainly by girls of the town, extravagantly dressed, 
rouged, painted, powdered, either accompanied by men 
or keeping their eyes open for a likely stranger entering 
from behind the screens. They are out "on the loose." 
The labourer's daughter is as determined as the daugh- 
ter of the clerk and shop assistant to have ' ' a good time." 

Descend to an even lower level. To realise the 
condition of modern childhood in our great cities, let 
your mind ponder the necessity for enactments concern- 
ing children under sixteen years of age and children 
under fourteen years of age. Where are the mothers of 
these children? And what have been the conditions 
of their home life ? Is it unreasonable to ask questions 
of the womanhood of the country? Is it not folly to 
wander away into the side-issue of economic conditions ? 

The novelist, Miss Clemence Dane, has lately taken 
up the question of cruelty to children, the awful and 
unspeakable cruelty which exists in all our great cities 
and towns, and which, for some unknown reason, is 
punished so lightly by the magistrates. 

She writes of "that vilest of all cruelties, child as- 
sault.' ' I quote the following instances from her article : 

How these men, guilty of unspeakable offences against 
children, are too often dealt with in practice, the following 
random extracts from newspapers may show, i" omit 
the unprintable details. 



WOMANHOOD 161 

For attempted assault on a child of four. Bound over 
on account of previous good character. 

For assault on child of seven. Sentence: six months. 

For stealing leather from employers (same case): six 
months. 

For assault on baby of four. Sentence : £2 fine. 

For assaulting and infecting a child of seven. Sen- 
tence: twelve months. 

For assaulting and infecting a child of seven: bound 
over. 

For assaulting (on the same day) two little girls: 
bound over. 

For assault on three small children — evidence unfit 
for publication. Sentence: £5 fine. 

For assault on child of twelve (six previous convictions 
for the same offence) . Sentence : three months. 

All this horror exists beneath the smiling surface 
of our national life. We may avert our heads, but 
it is there. We may refuse to think about it, but 
it is destroying us. Yes, destroying us; for all this 
horror and all this moral lassitude and all this joyless 
turning to debauchery for relief from the tedium of 
modern life, all this means that the great central ideal 
of the human race, a pure womanhood, is ceasing to 
inspire the heart of mankind. 

Ask social workers how it is that the children of 
our cities are so rapidly depraved, and they will tell 
you that the mothers are careless, that the mothers are 
often themselves utterly depraved, and that, in any 
case, the idea of parental authority is passing away. 



162 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

In almost every case, indeed I find it hard to discover 
a single exception, the mothers of girls who go to the 
dogs in their teens are women without moral energy 
and without ideals. 

We are not reading of Siberia, where girls of thirteen 
are often mothers, and where children of ten are often 
used as prostitutes; we are reading of the greatest 
country of the world, and of the greatest cities in that 
country. Is it not folly to wander away into the side- 
issue of economic conditions? Women are becoming 
bad. There is a moral declension. It has nothing to 
do with economics. It is a spirit appearing in the 
Richest and the Poorest. Housing and education are 
no valid factors in this problem. In every circle of the 
community, and in all conditions, morality has lost 
its grip. The particular woman is everywhere an 
anachronism. 

As I write there is a photograph on my mantelpiece 
of Eucken. I never turned its face to the wall during 
the War. Often I looked at his message on the photo- 
graph. "Rudolf Eucken sendet besten Gruss," 
followed by an invitation to Jena. 

I take one of his books from my shelves. This is 
what I read: 

At the present time, when the State is engrossed by 
economic and other constantly changing problems of the 
day, we need a community which attaches importance to 



WOMANHOOD 163 

the inner problems of humanity, and which directs our life 
towards eternal aims and values. 

Good! 

If morality be weakened, then life is robbed of a strong 
impulse, of an ennobling power, and of a dominant aim. 
. . . The salt of life is then lacking, which alone can 
keep it fresh and healthy. 

Thus spoke Rudolf Eucken in 191 3. 

What did Alfred Zimmern say of this great moralist 

in 1914? 

. . . men like Harnack, Eucken, and Wilamowitz, 
who would repudiate all intellectual kinship with Machia- 
velli and Nietzsche — men who are leaders of European 
thought . . . publicly support and encourage the policy 
and standpoint of a Government which, according to 
British ideas, has acted with criminal wickedness and folly, 
and so totally misunderstands the conduct and attitude of 
Great Britain as honestly to regard us as hypocritically 
treacherous to the highest interests of civilisation. 

Zimmern realised the peril of the position. It was 
not the criminal statesman or militarist in Germany 
who raised our greatest problem, but the chief moralists, 
the most noble and persuasive philosophers, of modern 
Germany. Eucken regarded our fealty to Belgium as 
an act of hypocrisy ! 

What are we to say, then? Eucken on the side 
of Prussianism! Eucken supporting the odious and 
pagan theory that the State has nothing to do with 



1 64 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

ethics ! If this madness is possible in one of the noblest 
men of our time, what are we to expect from our frivol- 
ous women, our women of villadom, our girls of the 
back-street and the slum? 

Are we to throw up our hands, like the Russians, and 
say that man cannot war against the spirit of his time, 
and that the Atlantic of tendency will always defeat 
the mop of moral idealism? 

Are we going from bad to worse ? Is the present time 
only the prelude to a millennium of anarchy? Are we 
living in another Drift Age — the whole mass of human- 
ity shifting like a glacier towards destruction ? Moral- 
ity — is it only an opinion, a convenience, a superstition? 
We who believe in self-control, in self-sacrifice, in self- 
improvement; are we, perhaps, very old-fashioned 
people whose days should have been cast in the times 
of the Puritans? 

It is not in English nature, I firmly believe, I ear- 
nestly hope, ever to despair of a great cause. There is 
something in an Englishman, as Goethe knew and 
acknowledged, which is superior to the greater intelli- 
gence of German professors ; it is our English character, 
our strong common sense, our instinct for right. Euck- 
en's defection must not, nay, cannot, destroy the very 
centre of our patriotism — faith in human perfection. 
The times may be opposed to us; but opposed to the 
times is something stronger than the clock, stronger 
than evil — the purpose of the universe. We know, too, 



WOMANHOOD 165 

that the very nature of evil is to defeat itself. After a 
little the palate craves for wholesome bread, and finally 
the digestion refuses poison. There may be a period 
before us of great moral darkness, but the sun will 
return and we shall see again the one straight narrow 
path that leads forward. 

In the meantime, are we merely to wait till the 
fever has burnt itself out, and the patient cries in the 
name of God for "something bitter"? 

Perhaps those who care for the moral foundations 
of the State might be content to stand aside and wait for 
the fever to burn itself out, if the fever had its rise in 
some folly of the flesh. But who that greatly cares for 
his country can bear to wait for the end of this fever, 
which has its rise in the moral nature of the individual, 
which altogether disowns responsibility, which rejects 
the higher life of the human spirit, which is against all 
seriousness, all aspiration, all reverence, all modesty, 
and the most dreadful symptom of which is its corrup- 
tion of Womanhood ? 

"There can be no time," said Lord Jeffrey, in a nota- 
ble censure, "in which the purity of female character 
can fail to be of the first importance to every community. 
. . . The character and morality of women exercises 
already a mighty influence upon the happiness and 
respectability of the nation. But if they should ever 
cease to be pure ... to overawe profligacy, and to win 
and to shame men into decency, fidelity, and love of 



166 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

unsullied virtue . . . domestic happiness and private 
honour will be extinguished, and public spirit and na- 
tional industry most probably annihilated along with 
them." 

Those words were written more than a hundred years 
ago; their occasion was not the corruption of women 
who knock about; they were inspired by the trivial 
poetry of Thomas Moore! What had Lord Jeffrey 
said of these days ? The crumbling has become a land- 
slide. 

Where the corruption of womanhood is concerned, 
no one who hopes for a greater race can stand idle, 
good women least of all. 

But what are we to do? 

I answer : If the nation is going wrong, it is being led 
wrong. Who are the leaders? The most powerful of 
all our leaders, I reply, is Fashion — not Parliament, not 
Church, not Press — but Fashion. If, then, we would 
go in a right direction instead of a wrong direction, those 
who set the nation its most conspicuous examples must 
be, not equivocally, not half-heartedly, not wearily, but 
enthusiastically on the side of Excellence. 



CHAPTER XI 

CONCLUSION 

Society originates in the need of a livelihood, but it exists for 
the sake of life. — Aristotle. 

The open secret flashes on the brain, 
As if one almost guessed it, almost knew 
Whence we have sailed and voyage whereunto. 

Frederic Myers. 

Never forget: The higher we soar, the smaller do we appear to 
those who cannot fly. — Nietzsche. 

In the course of this essay I have advanced certain 
propositions which may be summarised as follows : 

Fashion, because of its conspicuous position in the 
State, exercises the greatest of all influences on the 
nation. 

The influences of modern Fashion are injurious to the 
peaceful evolution of the British Commonwealth, being 
the influences of ostentation, self-indulgence, lawlessness, 
cynicism, and frivolity. 

The influence of Iniquity is not to be so greatly feared 
by a nation as the influence of Folly. 

It is by the domestic door, rather than the economic, 
that violence enters a State. 

The social, political, and moral health of a community 

167 



168 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

depends mainly upon its attitude towards life, that is to 
" say, its theory of existence. 

In a rational theory of existence it is impossible to 
divorce time from its context of eternity, place from its 
context of infinity, man from his context of evolution. 

At the head of a nation there should be an aristocracy 
of intelligence whose manner of life exhibits the truth of 
this theory. 

Out of these propositions, reminding myself of all the 
goodness and sweetness that exist in England, I develop 
the concluding proposition, forced upon me by the state 
of public morality, that goodness is not enough. 

This idea is not new. Aristotle made a vital dis- 
tinction between the excellence of conduct and the 
higher excellence of intelligence. But Aristotle did not 
develop his thesis to its revolutionary conclusion. That 
work was accomplished some four centuries later in the 
hills of Galilee, accomplished, but afterwards, except for 
a few, hidden away out of the knowledge of man for 
nearly two thousand years. We have forgotten that 
morality is not enough, altogether forgotten that Christ 
proclaimed His theory of existence as good news for 
mankind, Himself as the light of the world. 

When it is perceived that goodness is not enough, 
a revolution takes place in the human mind. It flashes 
upon us that it is an altogether different thing from 
merely being good to love excellence. No longer do we 
think of death as an end or the "Last Day" as an 
examination. We understand how it is that some per- 



CONCLUSION 169 

fectly good people do not inspire our affections or are 
even positively tiresome. We see how it is that life is so 
provincial and dull. Goodness is not enough. There is 
something beyond morality. Love of God ; how differ- 
ent from obedience to the Mosaic Law! We feel our- 
selves flying, through the eternity which now visibly 
surrounds us on every side, as birds fly in a summer 
sky. Joy takes a new meaning. Power clamours 
for a new definition. We are not in a rut; we are not 
shut down in a pit. We are children of God, and, if 
children, then heirs of eternal life; and eternal life is 
evolution, evolution towards ever greater power, ever 
greater understanding, ever greater bliss, "the reason 
always attentive, but always satisfied." This, I think, 
is the natural consequence of discovering our context in 
eternity. We enter on a new birth, a birth of joy and 
thanksgiving. 

I am coming to believe that we may now be moving 
towards another and a far greater renaissance than 
that which ended the long drowse of the middle ages. 
I feel that this present darkness has become so stifling, 
and this present confusion so inextricable, that we may 
expect humanity to rescue itself from a reversion to 
barbarism by one of those great forward movements 
which at long intervals in history have saved evolution 
from a fatal halt or a destructive recession. 

What will this next step be? A step, I think, from 
the excellence of conduct to the excellence of intelli- 



170 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

gence ; a step from a pious hope into a definite intellec- 
tual conception. The present depression of humanity 
has its origin, I believe, solely in man's degraded sense 
of his origin. The human race feels itself like a rat in a 
trap. We began in the mud and shall end in the mud. 
Life is reaching the end of its tether. There is nothing 
more to discover. The only business in the world is to 
get what you want before somebody else gets hold of it. 
Humanity rots for a new definition of life. 

I feel that distracted man would now welcome one 
who made plain to him that the gate of existence still 
stands wide open, that human life is no cul-de-sac but a 
thoroughfare, and that across the grey ocean of moral- 
ity there lies an undiscovered New World of spiritual 
adventure. To one who could convince humanity of its 
context, could reveal to it the universe as a book from 
which the page of earth cannot be torn, one who could 
make it perceive that evolution is at work now in the 
spirit of man, just as it was at work millions of years 
ago on the separate elements of protoplasm, to such a 
one I believe the human race would listen, at first with 
incredulity, but afterwards with relief and gladness. 
Then, if so, the earth would find a new stirring of life, 
such as it felt in the sixteenth century, when a dawn 
broke on human history which was like the gates of 
Paradise. 

The renaissance of the sixteenth century was a turn- 
ing back on the part of depressed humanity to the light 



CONCLUSION 171 

of Athenian culture. In that light men came to see a 
new world at their feet, and to speculate on a new 
universe around and within them. 

Let me remind the reader, in the words of Professor 
Muirhead, what the most modern of the Greeks be- 
lieved about man and his destiny. To Aristotle, 
"the nature of man is not that out of which he has 
developed, but that into which he is developing; not 
what he is at the lowest, but what he is at the highest ; 
not what he is born as (to borrow a happy distinction), 
but what he is born for." 

A flower is not less a flower because of the earth out of 
which it springs, or a statue a statue because it is 
resolvable into carbonate of lime. 

The glory of the flower and of the statue is that their 
materials have been transfigured in the making of them, 
as it is the glory of their materials to be so transfigured. 

Similarly, it is the glory of the soul to have moulded 
and transfigured the body, just as it is the glory of the 
body to have been moulded and transfigured by the soul. x 

Men of the middle ages, turning from superstition 
to walk in this enchanted garden of rational and fearless 
inquiry, brought to the earth a new dawn, and to the 
human race a new birth. They looked about them 
and felt themselves free. They stood upright on their 
feet, conscious of a new dignity in man. They were no 
longer slaves to the past; they were voyagers to the 

1 Chapters from Aristotle's Ethics, by J. H. Muirhead. 



172 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

unimaginable future. As regards our own nation, over 
whose island cliffs that great dawn rose last of all the 
countries in Western Europe, the new birth was mainly 
the work of a small and virtuous aristocracy which had 
exhausted the monotony of superstition and was aware 
in itself of powers pressing for exercise. It was a spirit- 
ual palingenesis, as well as an intellectual awakening. 

Erasmus, let us remind ourselves, extolled the Eng- 
lish nobility to all mankind for its learning and its se- 
rious purpose. He compared its refined discourse at 
table with the profligate talk then fashionable amongst 
priests on the continent. The children of aristocracy 
were educated with a view to making them true leaders 
of the nation. Roger Ascham, that characteristic 
Englishman, attacked with matchless power every 
foreign influence which tended to deflect nobility from 
its gracious duty. Sir Thomas Elyot held that just as 
the angels nearest to the Throne of God were those most 
capable of adoration, so the aristocracy of a nation, 
grouped round its King, should be most capable of set- 
ting an example in all virtue to the other classes; by 
"the beams of their excellent wit" they were to direct 
"others of inferior understanding" into the way of 
"commodious living." Ascham could say in 1550, 
"Never has the English nobility been so learned." 

Nor was this learning merely an ornament ; a nobler 
spirit than humanism moved upon the face of those 
waters. Sir Thomas More, described by Erasmus as 



CONCLUSION 173 

"the man of every hour," set the Commonwealth an 
ideal which to this day is far in advance of any demo- 
cratic state. He saw that society existed for life, not 
for bread-earning. He hated the idea of overwork for 
mere wages, and claimed that the worker had a right to 
leisure for the cultivation of his mind. He opposed 
himself to the sporting landlord who, by turning 
his tillage to permanent pasture, robbed the State of 
its strongest citizens. He hated the cruelty of blood 
sports, opposed himself to capital punishment, and was 
a prison reformer of the most humane and sensible 
character. Private property had no religious nimbus 
for More; his passion for the Commonwealth led him 
so far that he desired even the abolition of capital. 
Man, the creature most dear to God, was the supreme 
object of his moral and intellectual affections, and to 
ennoble man to fill his mind with wonder and rejoicing, 
to lead him away from all that depressed his soul, to 
guide him onward and upward into those paths of the 
spirit which alone lead to his destiny, this was the 
desire of that noble intellect, that gentle heart, that 
characteristic good Englishman. 

It was because the Renaissance proved in the end 
false to the aspiration of its highest minds that it lost 
power and flickered out into the gloom and twilight of 
disillusion. It looked back to the past, but not far 
enough, and forgot to look forward. It was unconscious 
of the eternity surrounding man, of which he is the 



174 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

inhabitant, and through which he is a voyager. It 
became, because of this short-sightedness, little more 
than a revival of paganism. Its fortunes fell into the 
hands of the Italianate Englishman, the mere intellec- 
tual fop. At the Restoration it was the possession of the 
coxcomb and the pedant, a thing without soul, a thing 
so shrunken and attenuated that it had no room for 
the spirit of humanity. Science saved it eventually 
from disrepute, and by the hand of Science its flag has 
been at least lifted from the gutter, and carried forward 
through the darkness of many troubled hours ; but the 
glory and joy of it have departed. Men no longer feel 
that life is a blessing. 

As one thinks of the fate of the Renaissance, one 
recalls a great saying by Coleridge: "Across the 
night of Paganism, Philosophy flitted on, like the lan- 
tern-fly of the tropics, a light to itself, and an orna- 
ment, but alas! no more than an ornament of the 
surrounding darkness." He showed how Christianity 
had revolutionised human thought. Philosophy sought 
to elevate the moral character by improving the in- 
tellect ; Christianity reversed the order. 

By relieving the mind from the distractions and 
importunities of the unruly passions, she improves the 
quality of the Understanding; while at the same time she 
presents for its contemplation objects so great and so bright 
as cannot but enlarge the organ by which they are 
contemplated. 



CONCLUSION 175 

No man taught more forcibly than Coleridge the 
necessity for preventing ' ' the rank vapours that steam 
up from the corrupt heart," but no man saw more 
vividly that the cleansed heart is only a means to the 
infinitely greater end of an exalted spirit. "While 
morality," says Marsh, "is something more than 
prudence, religion — the spiritual life — is something 
more than morality. ' ' It is by realising his kinship with 
the universe that man becomes the creative agent of 
joy. 

This, perhaps, is our way to a greater renaissance 
than that which illuminated the sixteenth century, and 
went astray in the seventeenth. He who would save 
the human race from darkness must go back to the light 
of the world, not to assert the claims of theology, not 
to strengthen the hands of clericalism, but simply to 
make faith in a spiritual purpose the very breath of 
human existence. Immortality must be an intellectual 
conviction, not an emotional uncertainty. Intelligence 
must become a passion. 

Man is a creature most dear to God. He is a citizen 
of a universe that is infinite. He is the child of a 
duration that is eternal. He cannot be dislodged from 
infinity and eternity any more than a day can be dis- 
lodged from a year. Loyalty to his moral nature is 
necessary to the understanding of his destiny, but his 
true happiness lies in the exercise of his spiritual facul- 
ties. Until he comprehends the greatness of his glory, 



176 THE GLASS OF FASHION 

and the unimaginable splendours of his inheritance, he 
must be a creature of unrest and ever greater confusion. 

Now, in this is the excellency of Man, that he is made 
capable of a communion with his Maker, and, because 
capable of it, is unsatisfied without it ; the soul being cut 
out (so to speak) to that largeness cannot be filled with 
less. 

In this renaissance of the human spirit, which appears 
to me our one way out from the present darkness, what 
part, if it comes, will be played by England? What 
part will be taken by the aristocracy, that is to say, by 
the people at the head of the nation? Can Fashion 
help us, can Mammon help us, to enter into a new 
birth of the human spirit ? 

I think the work of preparation must be done by 
others. I feel that our salvation will come from the 
good of all classes — from the good among the aristocracy, 
the good among the numerous middle classes, the good 
among the manual workers — and that this work of 
salvation will proceed from the knowledge that, beyond 
obedience to morals, there is a boundless region of spirit- 
ual excellence waiting for the exploration of mankind. 
The good will become our aristocracy when they 
understand that goodness is not enough. 



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